Photographing a floral symphony
The photo book "Blossom" shows flowers in all their forms. A veteran Swiss photographer and team of designers bring the blooms to life on its pages.
The book show all colours and shades of flowers, leading us through the seasons. Photographer Anna Halm SchudelExternal link crawls into the blooms with her camera like a caterpillar, so close that we can almost feel the pollen in the pictures. The photographs also let us experience the life span of the flowers depicted. Some of the bouquets and petals are fresh, others withered, brittle and dry.
Halm Schudel has been dealing with the classical theme of flowers for 25 years and designers hi, Megi Zumstein and Claudio BarandunExternal link helped in producing her latest book.
The sequence of the illustrations goes back and forth between a life-affirming, cheerful and colourful palette and the faded, withered bouquets as a contrast between seduction and transience.
The two essays by Franziska KunzeExternal link and Nadine OlonetzkyExternal link in the book further explore this symbolism and digress into the history of flower still-lifes.
Halm Schudel, born in 1945, lives and works as a freelance photographer in Zurich. She studied in the western Swiss town of Vevey and at Birmingham’s College of Art and Design in England. She also spent five years as an assistant to the Zurich photographer René Groebli.
The book was published by Scheidegger&Spiess in Zurich earlier this year.
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here. Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.