Shadow Sunflower:
An Art Photography Series
by Avi Kroo
The Joy of seeing flowers on the windowsill are long gone. Only their shadow remains projected on the drapes that cover them and repress their essence. Repressing flowers with, like repressing joy, always invites the criticism of ignorant people. They will tell me to just push the drapes to the side. What they forget is that drapes will always cover something, and once something has been covered, it is changed forever.
The poet Robert Bly, in his book, A Little Book on The Human Shadow, describes repression as a bag we drag behind us. Whenever there is something about us that we feel needs to be gotten rid of, we put it in the bag. Though a helpful metaphor, it fails for me in it's lack of aggression and randomness. When you repress, you don't only lose what you intended to, you also lose anything that was associated with it. Repression only gets more aggressive the more often you use it. You start pulling the curtain harder and harder without caring what petals are being ripped or crumpled or what vases are falling to the ground, being lost forever.
Art Photography, as a genre is extremely varied in content. My series, Shadow Sunflower falls into the sub-genre of self portraiture. In December of 2020 I fell into a deep depression rooted in the parts of myself I had lost to repression. My series, Shadow Sunflower is a representation of my struggle to re-connect with my happiness after repressing, but only finding the shadow of what used to be a smile on my face. Since the 17th century, artists have been using still life as a form of self portraiture through symbolism of objects, as described by Professor Celeste Brusati in her journal article Stilled Lives: Self-Portraiture and Self-Reflection in Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Still-Life Painting. In the article, Professor Brusati explores self portraiture in still life throughout the 17th century. Her examples range from using symbolic objects, to the artist capturing themselves reflected through reflective objects. My Series does not perfectly fit into the style of other artists in the genre, as a part of my subject loses clarity to show that the memory of that happiness I repressed is fading. In my series, not only is my object symbolic, but the setting, lighting and focus have symbolic meaning too.
