Botanical Memories
Rewriting and recreating
The photos below were taken in Spring 2009 when Flickr was a vibrant community where people like myself were manipulating and texturising digital photos with software like photoshop. Each image was a labour of love taking hours of layering textures, adding blurs and scratches to render these ‘memories’.
They would then be posted in 'groups' with names like 'dream nature' or 'memory and desire' or 'painterly'. The direction seemed to be to create, abstracted, impressionistic images that evoked mood and memory. Not sure how it happened but a square format also became popular. A fascinating creative community developed around this with enterprising creators selling premade textures kits.
Then Instagram launched in October 2010 and filters did it at a touch of a button. As cameras became more technically capable, creatives wanted to do the opposite looking at Holga and Polaroid images with ditortions and leaked light. In his junior year, Instagram founder Kevin Systrom went to study Italian in Italy where his professor introduced him to the Holga - you can read that story here . His co-founder Mike Krieger who majored in symbolic systems, an interdisciplinary program that blends coding with psychology, linguistics and philosophy. This combination of aesthetics and the psychology of human/machine interface proved to be the unique chemistry that drove Instagram's meteoric rise.
Then came video sites like Blip and Vimeo and by 2014 I was experimenting with telling short stories like Noah’s garden;
Or making moody abstracted visual essays set to music like Daffodil Prelude:
The making of these botanical memories became complicated as the digital landscape shifted. Platforms went out of business or changed their pricing plans from free. Forgotten passwords, ageing computers all added to being locked out of accounts, files getting lost or no longer being available online. Now begins the process of moving things from one platform to another and trying to figure out how to save some of the work created.
One example - I have a bunch of flipbooks on Issuu, now unavailable unless I upgrade to a pricey subscription plan, that now need to be converted into videos to be able to repost them here. Here’s one example previewed below: Garden Noir, a combination of photos and graphic design .
(I’ve since reposted these flipbooks: Garden Noir, Bleak Beauty )
I also got really busy with landscape work that left little time for the lengthy creative process required to create this work. But I want to carve out some time again to do them - to publish here on Substack in combination with youtube and instagram as I start new profiles over there. This will need a review of all the new tools out there, a little reskilling, some going back into the archives to see what deserves reformatting and then the creation of some new pieces. Why ? Because I never wanted to create ‘how to’ content which dominates the gardening content space - my intent was always to capture a moment or feeling when I squinted my eyes and took in the garden or landscape in front of me. Or to document a creative project or process which in this case happens to involve botanicals, gardens or landscapes. Stay tuned as I figure this out.