Searchings: Secret Landscapes of Flowers, Vol. II

In Searchings: Secret Landscapes of Flowers, Volume II, photographer Barbara Bordnick continues a journey she began when she idly turned her new camera on a few flowers she had in her studio. At the time, she had no particular purpose, other than to see what the results would be. As she put it in a recent interview, "To me, photographing flowers was a sign that retirement was just around the corner." Two years later following the 2003 publication of Searchings, her first volume of flower photographs, Bordnick now acknowledges that "photographing flowers was meant to be." In this second volume of her work, she enters a new stage in the evolution of her unique relationship to her subject. On the one hand, she has equipped herself with the newer, more technically superior camera. On the other, she has over the course of this work refined her perception of what is, at heart, a flower's basic nature: its infinite variety of being. Reflected through the lens of her camera, the images are as much about this perception - and the photographer's sense of her own existence - as they are about the flowers themselves. As Bordnick describes it, "My photos have nothing to do with describing flowers. The photographs have to do with an emotional experience and a personal voyage."