Via Negativa - Meditations

Photographing what remains after a plant has finished living - the tendril, the husk, the spent seed head, the curl of a dried leaf. Working in black and white, I remove light until only the celebration of form survives. Each subject rises from darkness and, image by image, returns to it.

The series is a descent. It opens in soft gray and dims toward black, shedding tone the way these plants shed everything but structure. This is the via negativa: knowing a thing by what falls away. Decay, here, is not an ending but a clarifying. Stripped of color, context, and finally light, each form becomes calligraphic - lines against the dark. A meditation on quietude, and on the meaning that survives subtraction.