Judith Donath

Aesthetic Selection is a fine art series of layered flower images, each composition designed to interpose shape and texture, creating a shifting portrait of floral form and botanical detail.

To make these images, I start by photographing living flowers outdoors in natural light. I combine the chosen photographs as full frames, selectively blending the layers using a spatial-frequency-based process.

Every spring, after the long colorless New England winter, I am entranced by the emergence of green shoots, and find the successive waves of blossoms to be photographically irresistible. This attraction is not surprising, for flowers have evolved to be enticingly beautiful. Rooted in place, plants must lure others to assist their reproductive process, to carry pollen from the stamens of one flower to the pistil of another. The beauty and variety of floral forms is the evolutionary result of the competition to attract various pollinators—insects, birds, and now humans, too—with wildly differing sensory preferences and anatomical abilities.

I am far from alone in finding flowers to be an fascinating subject for art: does the world need another picture of a rose or tulip? Yet this familiarity can make us blind to really looking at them; we often simply recognize them, without really noticing the fantastic structure and detail of even the most common place blossom. My goal with this project is to create images that entice people to look afresh at these remarkable botanical solutions to the dual goals of pollinator attraction and sexual reproduction.