Flowers (2004-05)

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This series of photographs was taken between 2004 and 2005 at various locations in and around London. The images depict wildflowers that have grown in mundane and often unattractive surroundings, such as traffic islands and road verges. Rather than concentrating on their location, Gersht contemplates the flowers themselves and, using a long exposure that almost erases the film, distorting both colour and form, creates images that appear to be of Elysian Fields, not roadside wilderness.

 

Gersht has long been interested in the camera as a subjective rather than as an objective tool, with which to depict reality and transform its subject. In these works the transformation is from the mundane to the magical. There is an undeniable elegiac feel to the photographs and they are resonant of both remembering and forgetting.