shashasha

Following his publication “Withered Flowers”, Japanese photographer Kazunali Tajima returns with a variation on the theme in black and white.
Drawn towards the conflicting beauty of wilting flowers, Tajima’s previous series captured the intricacies and details of the flowers’ process of decay and death, finding beauty in their loss of freshness and vitality.
With “Withered Flowers Black”, Tajima explores the possibilities and limitations of black-and-white photography with the subject of the withered flower. As he writes in his afterword, shooting in black and white means losing access to “all of the pretty colors that flowers are naturally equipped with.”

“In order to make the monochromatic images in this series look more appealing than the color ones, I worked out quite elaborate lighting settings for the shootings. Compared to the color pictures, the results may appear more photographic, which means that here it is perhaps the ‘photograph’ itself that is presented, rather than the ‘flower’ in it.”
― from Kazunali Tajima’s afterword