Erotica

The heart and sexus of orchids and hibiscus flowers photographed over three hours on August 6, 2009 in the Orchid Exhibition at the Medellin Botanical Garden during the city's annual Festival of Flowers, Medellin, Colombia.

I confess I had seen a couple of Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings for the first time while visiting Santa Fe, NM, in 2006. Beyond the known cliches and the paint and brustrokes, her paintings made me feel beautiful things I could not understand. O'keeffe planted a seed. And I began to explore the idea of photographing the inner sactums of flowers, and as the effort was a challenge, my preocupations the day I took these portraits were exclusively technical. 

Looking at the portraits a few days later, I discovered that my technical interest had been cast aside by the electric ecstasy of love for my future wife shooting through me that day. Fourteen years later, I realize that to call the series Erotica is but a sliver of what was going on in me that day as the experience took me into places of feeling my conscious has yet to fathom.

These portraits remind me that all I know of love can be followed along the rim of a petal or a segment of an anther that stand in the softest focus. Everything else I know of love is out of focus. Even when my heart was exploding with colors I shall never comprehend. 

"It is the east, and Lina is the sun."