Albert Renger-Patzsch

Flower

1920

“We seldom consider objects that are right at hand. Our daily routine engenders repetition, expectation, and distraction, making it difficult to pay fresh and focused attention to any one thing. We are grateful that our busy minds can catalog what we see quickly, visually, without reflection or further investigation. Often only in memory do we consider the meaning of those few things we notice from the flow of life. Albert Renger-Patzsch’s Flower exemplifies photography’s unique ability to arrest the processes of movement and change, to isolate pieces of the world from their space and time, so that we can really see them. In the artist’s words, by focusing our “rapt, intransitive attention,” by separating this one flower not only from its surroundings but also from its actuality, his photograph performs an act of transformation and transcendence. The image is precisely descriptive—a spare, arresting document—and something more. In this flower’s delicacy and opulence we sense an extraordinary life force, both powerful and impermanent. Though specific in its observations, the photograph is far-reaching in its implications, testifying to the force of beauty, allegorizing nature’s continual engagement in cycles of generation, growth, demise, and decay… .”

:: Paul Roth, Curator of Photography and Media Arts
Corcoran Gallery of Art