A Minute Fraction of All the Flowers I've Ever Seen

This project began with an instant photograph of a flowering tree in Forsyth Park at the center of Savannah, Georgia. While scrutinizing the developing image of pink blossoms, I began to think about all that was not included within the frame, and of all of the flowers that I had passed by and had failed to photograph. Within one's life, flowers are a commonly-seen and commonly-captured object, admired for their beauty and further appreciated because of their impending disintegration. To photograph anything is to fight against death, time, and the fallibility of memory, and to photograph flowers is an attempt to stave off all three.

Drawing on the idea of the never-complete yet perpetually-growing global photographic archive, "A Minute Fraction of All the Flowers I've Ever Seen" is an illustration of the photograph's incompetency in cataloging one's experience, regardless of its claims to construct a coherent timeline. Overwhelmed as we are by images, and despite our insistence that we can create a visual inventory our lives through photographs, experience is fundamentally resistant to true or comprehensive documentation.

As of February 20, 2020, the project totals 149 unique, instant photographs of flowers. My vision for the project, however, is much larger: I intend to create a grid of 2,376 Fujifilm instax mini photographs. Mounted on 99 panels, each containing 24 photographs (6 high by 4 wide), the grid will measure 8.25 feet high by 10 feet wide. Although initially overwhelmed by the sheer number of instant photographs, upon further inspection one will find that each photograph is unique and detailed, an intricate capture of time, place, and fleeting life. The amount of images and the detail contained within them seems staggering, yet the title is a pressing reminder that this flood of imagery is merely a sliver of all of the flowers that I have seen within my lifetime, and with each passing day it will become a smaller and smaller percentage.