Recycled Beauty
(Art print: 84 by 101.6 centimeters, (“33 by 40”) Edition of 23 and 3 A/P.. Open Edition, 30.48 by 55.88 (17” x 22”)
“Recycled Beauty” is an ongoing project in which I rescue old technology like 4X5 cameras, obsolete scanners and film from another era as well as the flowers and plants that have been discarded to create the images. For example, the film I use is often 10 to 24 years old, mostly Polaroid type 55 which was discontinued in 2009. The cameras I use are about 30 to 60 years old and found over the years at thrift stores or garage sales. The flowers are often salvaged from flower shops after no longer being salable and would have been thrown away anyway. Other flowers were collected at the end of friends' or relatives' weddings or birthday parties where I would rescue them next to broken bottles and used dinner plates. I also retrieve the flowers from landscaping companies' trash bins or from the homes of people who feel the plants or trees in their yard are no longer a thing of beauty or part of their new landscaping vision.
My purposes are to recycle the beauty of the plants’ blooms as well as explore the idea of our disposable culture that quickly discards even recently ‘beautiful’ things for the next one to take its place, and also to use tools that are considered obsolete to create images that look and feel as fresh as those created with the latest camera technology.
—joSon, Nov. 2017