A great deal has already been said and written about, and a lot of photographs taken of, flowers. Without a doubt, they make exceptional models. They have bright and multicoloured hearts, they feel like velvet. They steal the light and deliver it back to you softer, more precious, almost as though you could touch it. They wear it like a beautiful gown, a new one every time.
I was fascinated by their diversity, as many people are, I should imagine.
I had my favourites, though it was with meadow flowers that I established a particular connection.
As so often happens to me, the desire to try to photograph them came purely by chance. ‘How’ to do it has been a slow evolution over time. Looking down on them from above, they said nothing to me. If I tried to capture their form from too close up, I lost their gracefulness.
So I said to myself: why not try to photograph flowers like you do people? Perhaps from behind, a full figure portrait, as though caught in the action of doing something. Or, better still, captured in the very moment in which they seem concentrated on telling a story.
There they are before you, dabs of colour amongst the green of the grass and the blue of the sky, intently focused on the effort of blossoming. Or with their heads down, close to one another, as they whisper intimate, secret stories, or snigger together at the wind as it passes them by.
And so I started to lower my point of view, until I got right down in front them. I didn’t want to photograph them by towering high above; instead, I wanted to ‘look them in the face’, otherwise I believed they wouldn’t have said anything to me.
Getting up so close and so low down, their shape and structure seemed ever more complex and fascinating. Such as this tiny purple flower, which looks almost like a molecule. A careful job of balance and bravery, in keeping all its little branches tied together, tells me the story of its small community.

Then there is this lady, the elegant rose, head held high to sniff the mild autumn sky, as though she is trying to pick up the scented voices of her companions, or a far-off melody that only she can hear.

Or the last and bravest solitary daisies, whose petals are raised in greeting to the sun, over and above the clouds.

I also used to keep the flowers that I collected in a little coffee cup on my desk. Every cup had its own unique story: there was the solitary daisy, who sang at night whilst bathing her feet in the water; the angelic, snow white lisianthus, lost in meditation; and the story of this group of daisies, intent on sailing their little blue boat towards a single ray of light.

The special thing, the thing that struck me the most, was how they managed to almost transform their structure according to the light. Such as this trumpet flower, which, exposed in full sunlight, could nearly be made of glass.

Their story, bit by bit, became mine too; a very personal search for the best way to express my creativity. Neither different, nor better, nor worse than any other, but one of a kind.
Just in the same way that every flower, though similar to its siblings of the same species, is still different in its own way.

Cinzia Bolognesi – graphic designer and illustrator

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