Flourishing: the Dancing Azalea

A few days ago I walked into the bonsai courtyards at the Chicago Botanic Garden and decided to see what I could find there through my viewfinder. The whole idea of bonsai seems to me to be an abstraction of nature--creating a perfectly controlled, beautiful miniature plant. So just "taking" a picture of a bonsai seems to be not much more than recording the abstraction created by the gardener. But, I was drawn to the azalea bonsai, which was perfectly in bloom and beautiful beyond words.

The image is pleasing to me despite its imperfection (do you see what?). I had decided to extend my photographic thinking for this summer to include "flourishing" as a theme and this seems to fit. But flourishing can be much more, and I was thinking that images of flourishing might go beyond the very literal, using the expressionist approach of capturing images with a moving camera.

So, here it is, the Dancing Azalea.

At first I wanted to go back and try again, but I suspect it is already too late! And the idea of "dancing" did not come until the wee hours of this morning. As a sequence the images convey shaking and shimmying, each move with the gesture and personality of a dancer. I then thought of a sequence of photos taken by my sister of my Dad a few years ago, dancing and conducting to Mozart in his wood shop with the most delighted expressions on his face.

Unfurling: the whole collection

Unfurling