London, 14 February 2025 — I was awarded 1st prize and gold medal by the Royal Photographic Society in the portfolio category of Kew Gardens “International Garden Photographer of the Year” competition (2024). The entry, A Cast of Characters, consists of six botanical portraits taken in my studio in Pasadena. As a British national who has never lived in the UK, it was a very emotional affair to be honored by the RPS and Kew, an award my late father, a Victory gardener during World War II would have been very surprised to find out considering his son’s lack of enthusiasm for anything botanical while growing up. Special thanks to Linda McGlinchey, Tyrone McGlinchey FLS FRSA, and RPS Chair Andy Golding.
A Cast of Characters
The beginning of the pandemic coincided with my wife Sarah and I deciding to move away from the urban neighborhood of Silver Lake in Los Angeles to semirural Pasadena, a town on the outskirts of the metropolis. As for many artists, a long journey of looking inward began. Limited in my movements I decided to fully dedicate myself to the magical world of plants, a recently discovered passion of mine. This new appreciation was born in 2019 while on commission in the Cayman Islands documenting endemic and endangered species of the small archipelago. The ensuing show, Homegrown, is a collection of large photographic prints which was shown at the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands and subsequently acquired by the museum. Back in California I decided to dedicate myself full-time to my new devotion but in a Lilliput of my own: our garden.
Following in the footsteps of Homegrown, I only photograph specimens from the garden, where property lines are the defining boundaries of my realm. It is an island of sorts where plants are seemingly in their natural state but where the human intervention is never far away. More sorrel and clover than rare orchids, it is a community of locals, guests, and aliens. It is my frame, my palette. For a photographer whose main focus is the plant world and confined to a self-imposed territory of a quarter of an acre, my practice demands a continuous supply of subjects. Better known for its deserts and beaches, Southern California doesn’t harbor the verdant forests of mangroves and ostentatious orchids of the Caribbean. Its inhabitants, the vegetal kind, tend to be of the smaller drought tolerant type. Counterintuitively, those smaller specimens have the greatest potential for the artist. Historically, artists have been depicting large and easily recognizable plants for almost as long as the gardener has been domesticating them. This familiarity invites scrutiny and an expectation as to how to represent them. Too small, and they become a science curiosity with no reference point. Just beyond the average human acuity is where I like them. Unmistakably vegetal and familiar yet still foreign and perplexing to the uninitiated.
A Cast of Characters is a small subset of the two thousand plus shots I have taken over the course of the past five years. Whereas anthropomorphism is frowned upon by academics as childish behavior, here it is encouraged. For most people, plants are ubiquitous passive bystanders with a somewhat pleasant predisposition. To the artist, this perceived innate neutrality is fertile ground to test the limits of representation. Plants allow the artist to observe an audience ascribe; and project onto; the most fanciful of human traits upon something that has none: pareidolia. While a scientist may strive to limit interference and subjectivity in their research, the artist will always be part of the creative process and the final result. I peer down at and expose a plant’s most private parts distorting their purpose for an audience that was never anticipated—humans and animals of a certain size are rarely the intended spectators of the striptease. The artist, as director, is an active participant in the production. It is they who magnifies our gaze of those shameless exhibitionists.
The six shots presented were all shot in my studio. They are focus stacks of 150-200 shots each. The stacks were processed in Helicon Focus, to be then retouched and color graded in photoshop. The final images are 24”x32” at 300dpi and 16 bit per channel.
