I have been enjoying my new old book on the life and photography of Aaron Siskind (Pleasures and Terrors by Chiarenza). Turns out that later in his career Siskind created a body of work based on photographs of dead leaves, a series of low key black and white images he referred to as 'old man photography'. Do we photograph dead or dying subjects as symbols of our own mortality and do these subjects tend to come to the fore in our work as we get older? Or are the objects themselves simply inherently more interesting? This daffodil has been sitting in a vase filled with water for several weeks and I've been watching it change over time. It appears to be suspended somewhere between life and death. Photographically, it is in a good place; biologically, not so much.
