Fine Art Flower Photography by Ann Mackay

www.TheSunflowerGallery.co.uk

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ABOUT: Flowers have fascinated me for as long as I can remember.

Flowers:

One of my earliest memories is of holding a London Pride (saxifraga x urbium), looking at it really close-up, and being surprised to find the red spots on the inside of its petals. I hadn’t expected to see such a tiny detail on a flower that itself seemed too small to be quite real. To a small child, it seemed more like a flower that belonged to a doll’s house!

A little later, I saw the orange flowers of a tiger lily, with its upswept spotted petals. To me at that young age, this was a flower so beautiful that it seemed impossibly exotic in our cold and windswept garden in the far north of Scotland. These small discoveries inspired a fascination with flowers...

Photography:

My passion for photography also started early. I was given my first camera at the age of eleven and by my late teens I’d created a makeshift darkroom in my bedroom so that I could develop and print black and white photographs.

Later, the Edinburgh Photographic Society provided photographic advice and encouragement. I then decided to take a formal course of photography instruction and completed an HND in Photography at Stevenson College in Edinburgh. They were very helpful, allowing me to use flower and garden photography for my assignments wherever possible. (I think it was the first time they’d had a student so obsessed with flower photography.)

College introduced me to ‘Alternative Process’ photography, which is the use of historic processes such as cyanotype and gum bichromate. (You’ll see prints made with these methods here soon.) My interest in unusual and hybrid photographic processes has

(since moving to Suffolk) led me to join the Gainsborough’s House Printmakers. This has given me the opportunity to learn about photo-etching and photo-lithography.

Coupled with the advances in digital photography, these processes seem to offer unlimited scope for experimentation! In the future, I look forward to using combinations of photographic and printmaking processes and old and new technology to create my own printing styles.

Cyclamen