End frame: Papaver Nudicale by Tine Poppe

Carolyn Cheng

Carolyn Cheng is an abstract and aerial photographer who examines the feminine sublime in the natural world. She is based in Toronto, Canada.

carolyncheng.com

In a world where we are inundated with thousands of photos daily, it is a rare and delightful pleasure to see an image that is genuinely creative, visually arresting and imbued with meaning. When I first came across Tine Poppe’s series, Gilded Lilies, I was immediately enthralled and could sense the purpose and power within the images. (Note: I encourage you to view the full series as it tells the story even more powerfully.)

At first glance, the images are strikingly atmospheric, beautiful yet foreboding and magically complex. The flowers, just past their peak and beginning to wilt, are set against the smoky, foggy and greyed landscape backgrounds, which evoke the tumult and terror of Romantic era painters working in nature’s Sublime.

As I read about the work, I understood that Tine was inspired by a TED Talk called Not So Rosy, which highlighted the environmental impact of cut flowers, now more commonly grown in industrial-scale greenhouses in Africa and South America. This resonated with me as I recalled, seemingly oddly at the time, that my local florist mentioned their poppies came from New Zealand. In these greenhouses, plants are engineered to look prettier, bloom earlier and last longer. They are then flown thousands of miles in the refrigerated holds of airplanes, only to find their way into our homes for a brief period of time before being casually thrown out. Unfortunately, all of these “improvements” come at great cost to our environment in the pursuit of an artificial perfection, obfuscating us from genuine natural beauty.