sandy fellman

When researching and preparing for this assignment I thought immediately of Sandi Fellman. Her images were the ones that struck me the most in the still life lecture with regard to botanical macro photography. The thing I love about her work so much is that she doesn't focus on photographing a plant or flower to give the viewer just an accurate representation of it. Instead she uses a lot of depth of field and focus's on one small section or shape within the plant. This is something I'm very much interested in myself. I don't find the whole plant in all its obviousness as interesting and when viewing wider framing it is much harder to pick up the smaller finer patterns and unique details hidden within each specimen.

Sandi Fellman, Rose.

I recognise in Fellman's work that same love and fascinatination for nature and the forms in nature that I am also completely obsessed by and have been interested in since a young girl following both my grandparents and avid gardening mother around their huge gardens as they tended them. Where I am different to Fellman is that I want to use less typically recognisable and pretty members of the plant kingdom as my subjects and to focus even closer in, almost to the point where the recognisable features of each plant are completely discarded and we are left with only the beautiful individual patterns unique to each plant.

Sandi Fellman, Peony, 1995

Her use of the soft bright white light is so beautiful and ethereal. The images have a gentle softness to them which highlights the beauty in the individual features of each flower. They are very plump with life and have an almost dreamlike quality. Often she seems to light them overhead from one side and have a section of the flower nodding in the direction of the light as if to emulate the relationship between the flower and the sun.

Sandi Fellman, Dogwood, 1996

I think I prefer her black and white images to the vibrant bright coloured ones. They are more elusive with the sepia tone (rather than pure black and white which is where I'm also heading with my collection of weeds), and this soft light brownish tone brings an agelessness to the images, as if they are suspended in time and will not soon die and the bright colours fade as we know they eventually do. The lack of intense and accurate colour also helps to push the viewer more towards appreciating the form and pattern rather than being distracted by the rich intoxicating colours designed with the same intention to distract bees.

Sandi Fellman, Rose.

One of the biggest things I take away from her work is to not forget to photograph the sides and backs of the plants as she does in many of her images. She also uses interesting pairing of images in the final presentation, which is one of my original thoughts for this project before I saw her work,  although I think I am going to try mine in groups of three. But more on that later.....