Florilegium by Kim Ellen Kauffman (May 14, 2010) 
(27 votes, average: 3.89 out of 5)
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Introduction by Recommending Viewer
Howard Bossen, Professor at the School of Journalism at the Michigan State University and Adjunct Curator at the Kresge Art Museum recommended Kim Ellen Kauffman to us, writing: Kim Kauffman’s Florilegium series challenges our understanding of how a photograph is made, and indeed, the very definition of what constitutes a photograph. This work is made without a camera. It hearkens back to the cameraless sun prints of William Henry Fox-Talbot and Anna Atkins, to the photograms of Man Ray and the abstract color studies of Henry Holmes Smith. And, yet it is also a pure product of the digital age. Each plant piece is scanned. Kauffman catalogues and stores thousands of individual scans in her electronic image library. It is after this step that the magic begins. Kauffman’s vision comes alive when she pulls the various separate images into PhotoShop and works with scale, opacity and layers to create a magic world where at first glance each of these elegant color photographs looks believable. You can identify the various plant parts that form the components of her complex photographic collages. After you study each image you realize that something is unsettling; big is sometimes little, plants that don’t co-exist in nature have symbiotic relationships. Upon reflection you understand that you have been seduced by the surreal.
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Our poll "A photo essay always needs a great written story" closed. 267 people voted, 28% agrees, 72% disagrees. 233 people answered our follow-up question "Are you a photographer?" 82% indicated they are, 18% said no. Initially, negative answers to question #1 were almost 100% as was the pecentage of photographers among respondants. Then, when the level of non-photographers started to rise, the percentage of people indicating good text is always essential started to rise too. This seems to indicate that non-photographers think that adding good text to your photo essays is essential. In my opinion: if you want non-photographers to dig your work, you know what to do...
Florilegium, a series of botanically inspired photo-collages begun in 1998, was borne of a desire to share my appreciation of the garden and gardening as a multidimensional, restorative experience. Gardens are a meeting point between the human hand and nature. They are an easily accessible way for us to reconnect daily with the natural world and be reminded of our place in it. I wished to convey through my artwork this essential connection. I did not want to simply make pretty documents of flowers and landscapes, but rather images that would invite viewers to look more closely at the natural world, as a gardener might. A non-literal, layered image was what I had in mind. This led to a number of years experimenting with many ways of combining images based in analog methods. The advent of digital photographic technology allowed me to realize what I had in my minds eye. Finally, I arrived at the digitally based cameraless, photo-collage process that allows me to seamlessly realize my vision.
In these photographs I combine flowers, leaves, seed pods and other natural objects collected from gardens and nature. The combinations are not necessarily real but bring to the forefront an intricacy that otherwise might be missed –– the curve of a petal, the
vein texture of a leaf, the pattern of seeds dispersing. I am fascinated by plants as they age – faded flowers that are past their prime intrigue me as much as do flowers at their peak. I find beauty in the imperfections I see in the subjects I choose: the variation from one flower to another; the wounds that a plant has suffered in life shared with humans, bugs, the weather; or simply the signs of aging. The stages of growth and decay depicted in these images suggest life’s rhythms and dramas.
I have named this series Florilegium after the books of flower paintings commissioned in the 16th and 17th centuries as European plant explorers traveled to the far reaches of the world in search of botanical treasures. These books, literally “gatherings of flowers”, have influenced the content and structure of my images.
Our modern lives are often hectic and disconnected from the natural world. My goal is to help the viewer see more clearly that world, of which we are a part. Perhaps, for us to conscientiously live in the natural world, we need more references to it in our lives – so that we may come to value it more. In our modern culture, so inundated with self-reference, I choose to create images from the natural world.
Kim Ellen Kauffman (1952) lives and works in Lansing, Michigan USA.
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