Wood Lily, 2022.
Earlier this year, Fotografiska Emerging and The Estée Lauder Companies' Breast Cancer Campaign, in partnership with Vogue Germany, issued an open call titled One in Eight — inviting photographers to respond to the lived experience of breast cancer. The call received more than one thousand submissions from around the world.
The brief asked for something I had never made before. I spent four years with a single subject — returning to it, reworking it, letting it become what it needed to be — and the result is Mu Lan, a series of four botanical portraits rendered in infrared: Heart Lily, Mu Lan, The Vigil, and Wood Lily. Lilies and ferns held against black, their forms luminous and exposed, transformed by light the eye cannot ordinarily see.
The series is dedicated to my mother, who goes for a mammogram every year. The subject is a calla lily — a flower that returns each spring, as faithfully as her good health has returned each year. 木兰 is the name I chose for this work, for everything it holds.
The work was not selected for the final exhibition, and that is all right. Some work is made because a brief asks the right question at the right time, and the making itself becomes the answer. I am grateful to Fotografiska and Estée Lauder for asking it.
