ART & PHOTOGRAPHY


Tess was the featured artist in Sad Girl Review, an arts magazine in British Columbia. She submitted the following photos as a collection called “The Flower Collector”.

IN HER OWN WORDS:

“The Flower Collector contrasts the ephemeral nature of flowers and the natural world with the permanence of documentation via photography.”


VISUAL ANALYSIS OF THE FLOWER COLLECTOR
An essay by Amber Morrison Fox

Editorial Note: Tess submitted her images with a brief description to Sad Girl Review on November 19, 2019. Her life ended on December 11 of 2019, but her email was not discovered until late July 2020. I deeply regret that I did not get the opportunity to ask her any questions about her work, and because of this I do not want to project any assumptions onto her images. I will simply share what I know and elaborate on what I see in her series.

In looking at Tess’s pictures I asked myself: What can be understood from only five images?

Tess’s submission email mentioned that she took this series of photographs between April 2018 and April 2019. The Flower Collector was received in the following order and the individual photos were untitled. I decided to visually examine Tess's work in an attempt to come to a better understanding as to why she sent it, though as expected, more questions than answers developed. While we may not be able to fully comprehend what The Flower Collector meant to Tess beyond her artist statement, we can look closely at what she provided and wonder what it might mean for us as viewers. It is fascinating to sit with and analyze an artist's work, to see the visual language they are drawn to and how they use it to express themselves. I speculated about where Tess stood in relation to her subjects and questioned why she cropped images the way she did. Did she opt to apply any editing techniques or did she pull pictures right off of her camera? I thought of her focusing her lens as she placed little purple flowers in some shots and posed her friends with them in others. She coherently presents a theme and approach; she was drawn to the hallmarks of spring and she offered them to us for our consideration.

View the original piece in Issue 5 of Sad Girl Review.


Tess’s Photography