Kazuya Hashimoto

Botanical Photo Composition. That is how I describe my artwork. Over the course of my many years as a florist, I have learned both the Japanese aesthetic of flowers as an ikebana flower arranger and the Western aesthetic of flowers as a floral designer. However, I have long felt frustrated that the...

Botanical Photo Composition. That is how I describe my artwork. Over the course of my many years as a florist, I have learned both the Japanese aesthetic of flowers as an ikebana flower arranger and the Western aesthetic of flowers as a floral designer. However, I have long felt frustrated that the beauty of the flowers I see and display every day cannot be reproduced in real life, no matter which photographer I ask. To "arrange flowers" is to ask the flowers and intentionally place them, in other words, to composite them. I realized that unless the photographer can capture the imagination of the flower arranger in his or her mind, the beauty of the flower as I see it cannot be expressed. I decided to stop leaving the photographing to others, and to photograph each flower, leaf, and branch from the perspective and angle that I myself, a long-time flower artist and hanashokunin, had intended to use to arrange the flowers, so that they would appear as individual elements, but also in harmony with the other elements at the end. I decided to photograph each flower, leaf, and branch from a viewpoint and angle based on the intent of the work. In this way, the materials for digital ikebana were freed from the constraints of season and space, and became flowers dreaming of the time when they could be arranged. I cut out these flowers, curated them according to my imagination, combined them, composed them, and composited them onto a digital canvas to present the beauty of flowers that I have witnessed and discovered in the many encounters with flowers over the course of my half-life. In this sense, I am just one of the representatives and agents of the beauty that flowers reveal.