Photography and Tulips

Here is a photograph of the Canada Tulip. It was hybridized especially to celebrate Canada’s 150th national anniversary. Presumably - and I’m only guessing here - anybody can go to Canada and purchase the Canada Anniversary Tulip bulb, plant it in the garden and wait until spring when it erupts into this flower mush.

The 150th Anniversary, Canada National Tulip

I confess:  I don’t much like this flower.  I know something of tulips’ extravagant history. Victorian plant collectors spent their fortunes on tulip bulbs; they were solid collateral in international finance circles. The bottom fell out as all bottoms do. It’s an interesting tale (pardon the pun.)   

But I still don’t care for tulips. They supposedly stand for “elegance and grace” and “perfect love” according to various meaning-of-flowers’ internet sites but in my opinion, a tulip has no nuance. It’s the Kardashian of flowers.

Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe

Here’s another photograph of a single tulip. This photograph was taken by Robert Mapplethorpe and it is breathtakingly beautiful. In this picture, the tulip is ALL nuance.  No longer is it merely a flower; it’s a metaphor for a kaleidoscope  of human emotion. This is a marriage of a brilliant artist using a tool (the camera) he clearly mastered.

I stood beside an art dealer once looking at a photograph on a museum wall. She represented international art photographers and I was trying to say something not-stupid. 

“Photography may be the most democratic of all art forms. Everybody has a smart phone now and nothing is out-of-reach.”  

She looked like I had reached over and plucked her eyebrow.

“I don’t agree at all!” and she marched away.  (Oops, that did not go well.)

Recently I ordered Teju Cole’s book of essays “Known and Strange Things” and this is what he says about photography:

“Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs. It is about retention; not only the ability to make an image directly out of the interaction between light and the tangible world but also the possibility of saving that image. Human creativity, since the beginning of art, has found ways to double the visible world. What photography did was to give the world a way to double its own appearance.

But when the photograph outlives the body - when people die, scenes change, trees grow or are chopped down - it becomes a memorial.”

Today is Labor Day. Go take some pictures with your smart phone.