After reading Tim Carpenter’s “To Photograph is To Learn How to Die,” I’ve since looked at beauty with a transience sense of temporality. More often when I think of beauty, I think of flowers. Thus, I started this series.

To photograph a flower is to photograph death because a flower is finitely in its last moments. Each image becomes a small elegy, their beauty suspended at the edge of its own undoing. The flowers seen here are found on the streets around New York City, whether in tree beds, landscaping, and anywhere else on the streets that I pass by. They exist for beauty’s sake. More often than not, most passerby’s don’t even pay attention to how many there are. I chose to focus on street flowers because they’re common and you don’t even think twice about them. They exist for a moment, and then they’re gone. Similarly, as are we. Photography is an antithesis to this.

My work is guided by the understanding that all I will ever do is attempt to capture time. The photograph is here for a moment, and then it’s gone; the act of seeing becomes a rehearsal for letting go. With meditations on our fragile corporality, and how the photographer lives forever, this series asks to sit with a confrontation of mortality, and the cyclical nature of time.