Flower Portraits: The Life Cycle of Beauty

Following the success of her book of portraits, "Wise Women", photographer Joyce Tenneson turns her lens to the life of flowers. In this series of pictures, Tenneson records the often unseen and overlooked later phases in a plant's life and finds exquisite beauty in their blossoming and gradual decline. These stunning portraits celebrate the life cycle and allow the reader to appreciate flowers in a new way, as well as contemplate the poignancy, fragility and continual beauty of life itself. Tenneson's photographs follow the long tradition of the botanical illustrations of the 18th and 19th centuries as well as photographic masters such as Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe and Irving Penn. Just as "Wise Women" chronicled the energy, vitality and beauty of older women, "Flower Portraits" gives a compelling look at the radiant individual metamorphosis of flowers in the later stages of their lives.