Flower Portraits: The Life Cycle of Beauty

Following the tremendous success of her book of portraits, Wise Women, acclaimed photographer Joyce Tenneson now turns her lens to the life of flowers. In this enchanting series of photographs, Tenneson breaks new ground by recording the often unseen and overlooked later phases in a plant's life, and finds exquisite beauty in their blossoming and gradual decline. These stunning portraits celebrate the life cycle and allow the reader to appreciate flowers in a new way, as well as contemplate the poignancy, fragility, and continual beauty of life itself. Tenneson's photographs follow in the long tradition of botanical illustrations of the 18th and 19th centuries as well as photographic masters such as Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Irving Penn. Just as Tenneson's Wise Women chronicled the energy, vitality, and beauty of older women, FLOWER PORTRAITS offers a compelling look at the radiant and exquisitely individual metamorphosis of flowers in the later phases of their lives.