Photo 1: I

Photo 2: II

Photo 3: III

Photo 4: IV

Photo 5: V

Photo 6: VI

The beginning of the pandemic coincided with my wife Sarah and I, deciding to move away from the urban neighbourhood of Silver Lake in Los Angeles, to semi-rural Pasadena – a town on the outskirts of the metropolis. As for many artists, a long journey of looking inward began. Limited in my movements, I decided to fully dedicate myself to the magical world of plants, a recently discovered passion of mine.

This new appreciation was born in 2019 while on commission in the Cayman Islands, documenting endemic and endangered species of the small archipelago, and the subsequent exhibition of my prints at the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands. Back in California, I decided to dedicate myself full-time to my new devotion, but in a Lilliput of my own: our garden.

In this portfolio, I only photograph specimens from the garden, where property lines are the defining boundaries of my realm. It is an island of sorts where plants are seemingly in their natural state, but where the human intervention is never far away. More sorrel and clover than rare orchids, it is a community of locals, guests, and aliens. It is my frame, my palette. For a photographer whose main focus is the plant world and confined to a self-imposed territory of a quarter of an acre, my practice demands a continuous supply of subjects. Unmistakably vegetal and familiar, yet still foreign and perplexing to the uninitiated – ‘A Cast of Characters’ is a small subset of the two thousand plus shots I have taken, over the course of the past five years.

Whereas anthropomorphism is frowned upon by academics as childish behaviour, here it is encouraged. For most people, plants are ubiquitous passive bystanders, with a somewhat pleasant predisposition. To the artist, this perceived innate neutrality is fertile ground to test the limits of representation.

The six shots presented were all captured in my studio, and are made up of focus stacks of between one hundred and fifty to two hundred and twenty-five images each. They are named as follows; I: The Prize Fighter, II: The Bishop, III: The Grifter, IV: The Priestess, V: The Banker, VI: The Infanta.