In 2011, I spent a great deal of time look­ing down. I had grown quite accus­tomed to this while work­ing on a col­lec­tion of images. At some point (and to be fair it’s easy to fab­ri­cate a col­or­ful sto­ry, but that would be dis­hon­est), I noticed that the cone­flow­ers in the front yard of my house had spread dra­mat­i­cal­ly and some­how just about every but­ter­fly in the neigh­bor­hood found my yard to be an amuse­ment park. In my expe­ri­ence, almost every pho­tog­ra­ph­er pho­tographs the but­ter­flies and beau­ti­ful flow­ers on a bright, sun­ny day. Nat­u­ral­ly I found my camp­ing knife, yanked a hand­ful out of the yard and brought them into my dark and air con­di­tioned stu­dio for fur­ther examination. 

Ear­li­er in my career I came to the real­iza­tion that every flower is as unique as any per­son that I have ever come across. Each has a per­son­al­i­ty and a stage of life. From human eyes, it is impos­si­ble not to find human qual­i­ties in them after long hours and weeks of study. Visu­al artists get asked one ques­tion almost above any oth­er: “How long did that take you?” Most of the time I have no answer as I was too busy cre­at­ing to think about it. The time spent think­ing about the time spent in cre­at­ing some­thing is time spent not cre­at­ing some­thing else, and that can be unset­tling. This ran­dom side note aside, “The Curi­ous World of Cone Flow­ers” took 14 months to pho­to­graph. The col­lec­tion con­sists of 22 images. When view­ing the col­lec­tion, I encour­age you to look for bugs and spi­der­webs. There is far more to these sub­jects than you might think at first glance. Stare at them long enough, and you might start see­ing things that aren’t even there.