Paul Solberg

You might think that everything has been said about photographing flowers. You'd be wrong. Paul Solberg transforms botany into something you've never seen before: He takes you into a world of ethereal, translucent life forms. In this video he discusses the works presented in his exhibition at the Flo Peters Gallery in Hamburg.

Doing something new with flowers is challenging to say the least. The subject is dripping with sugar-sweet clichés: Valentine's Day, Weddings, romance and so on. But Solberg neither lives with flowers nor does he particularly like flower arrangements. There is no deep message in these images. It would, he says, be pretentious to claim so. He sees the flowers he photographs rather as jewellery that he makes portraits of. Robert Mapplethorpe's flowers were portraits too, but they are dark, sculptural images, almost like marble, laden with erotic innuendo.

Paul Solberg's images are stunning, light, almost abstract images of individual flowers, back-lit against white backgrounds.

Most of the work was done in the studio using a large array of small lights. Some shots were taken outdoors against the light. 'Light' is a word he uses repeatedly in talking about these pictures. " Colour is not the first thing that draws me in: It's the light". And on the subject of monochrome vs. Colour: " Black & white or colour is very secondary". 'Secondary' is the word he uses too about cameras: "They are beautiful machines, but it doesn't matter while I'm working. The most nimble and easy to use is what I use."

Paul was born in Minnesota in 1969, studied anthropology and photography in Cape Town, South Africa, andbecame a professional photographer quite late at the age of 35. There are echoes of Andy Warhol when he maintains," You don't have to make living at photography to be a photographer. You can't really teach photography. We're all photographers."

On his motivation in photography he says, "There's always a craving to do more. It's a process of slowing down and concentrating on one subject. Photography keeps me hungry, wonderfully ill at ease!"

Solberg lives in New York City.

A PDF version of Paul Solberg's book 'Bloom' is available free here.