Fine Art Photography Daily

Linda Morrow: Luminous Bloom

It was just a year ago, that I sat in the workshop,Turning Toward Books: Creating Artist Directed Publications, taught by the very capable Lauren Henkin.  All the participants came away energized and excited about creating beautiful artist handmade books and we were filled with possibility.  A year later, one of those workshop participants, photographer Linda Morrow, has made it to the finish line, with not only one amazing artist book, but two, and a third is soon to follow as part of her series, Luminous Bloom. The books are for sale on Linda’s site and are also available through photo-eye’s Publisher Direct.
Poppy was released this past summer and is comprised of thirty-two pages–including twelve images that loosely represent the life cycle of the Iceland Poppy.  The photographs are accompanied by original poetry by Margaret Langhan (Margaret’s work will be featured in all three books). Each page is exquisitely printed by Linda–the book is like looking at a master portfolio of sensuous prints.  Calla was recently released, and Angel Trumpet will follow this spring. All three retain the same level of quality.
Linda has a deep connection to the natural world. Growing up on her family’s ranch in Arizona, she spent long hours studying the landscape.  That led to an interest in photography, one that blossomed in 1994 in a darkroom workshop at Ghost Ranch down the road from Georgia O’Keefe’s former home in New Mexico. After a career teaching college English, Linda now fully concentrates on her book and image making in Long Beach, California.
Poppy and Calla Books
Luminous Bloom

My fondness for flowers was influenced years ago when as a child I would sometimes see my father come into the house carrying a single orchid from his cymbidium collection or a spectacular bloom from his rose garden. He would surprise my mother with it and at once create a special moment quite apart from the dusty, rough-hewn business of the ranch. This was long before I knew the meaning of Zen, but I could see that a beautiful flower, appearing suddenly as a gift, could entirely change the energy in the room and prompt a smile from my mother. The subject of these photographs is not, however, the flowers themselves, but our perceptions of them as shaped by a play of light and movement. At a point early on in my floral studies, I began to experiment with multiple-exposure, adding other dimensions, moving away from the literal, and raising questions about reality. I work in the dark –shutter open- trusting that a sustained level of trial and error and repetition will produce in-camera images wherein the flower appears to multiply and become an abstraction. Rendered in B/W, Luminous Bloom is an expression of line, form, shape, and tonality. It is made up of a trilogy: POPPY, CALLA, and ANGEL TRUMPET.

Images from Calla
Images from Poppy
Images from Angel Trumpet

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