Flowers.

Josef Sudek is one of those photographers people either have never heard of or love with a passion. I fall in to the latter camp. He was Czech, and lived and worked most of his life in and around Prague - his images of the streets and buildings are all smokily and beautifully rendered monochromes which probably felt of another era even when they were new.

During the second world war, Sudek began a series of photographs - still lives, mainly - set within the confines of his studio. Very often these were scenes framed by a window frame. The condensation often blurring out the world (and events) beyond his window; the focus very much on the subject - and very often this was a glass holding a simple flower stem.

There’s a gorgeous immediacy to the flowers Sudek captures. They’re like a promise. A treasure. A gift. They seem to me to be the manifest of an idea: of something other - something else. A memory, perhaps. A means of transport away from his present to something beyond the window, beyond the war.

Last October, in the last sunshine of the Autumn (it feels to me now, looking out my window frame onto a wet, grey January morning! ) I was asked to photograph a flower project by Lucy Phillips and Kara Johnson. Lucy grows and dries flowers and Kara creates amazing arrangements using Lucy’s flowers.

Their work is about as far from the image that the words ‘dried flower arrangement’ probably conjure up. Some arrangements look like constellations of stars. Others, like modernist sculptures. The long, slow process of drying the flowers seems to intensify the colours, which reminded me of Sudek’s use of flowers - as a means of transport.

It was a fun project to capture. There’s even talk of a book. In the meantime, I‘ve posted a few more of the shots in my gallery.