To step into the world of Bert GF Shankman’s photographs is to step into a strange garden. Magnolias may be electric blue instead of white, and the eyes of dogwood blossoms sometimes glow as if possessed. As in Grimm’s fairy tales, light is entwined with dark, and we’re always aware the velvet petal of a rose can cloak the sting of a thorn. That duality makes this work sensual and also subtly disturbing.
Shankman photographs flowers exclusively, all of which he grows in his own garden, patiently waiting for the shoots to poke through the earth in spring, then slowly unfurl and bloom. After photographing them, using multiple exposures, he begins the digital manipulations that transform his subjects from merely pretty objects into things infused with feeling.
Shankman calls them “flower portraits” because each image represents a person he has known. Seen through his lens, a tulip is a character reimagined as a tulip, its saturated blue-green or vermillion hues an expression not of botany but of temperament and mood.
Yet these highly personal studies can also be read as celebrations of color, texture and form, speaking to us in the universal language of design. A violet curl, rising before a deep pink background, might just as easily be an abstract form or a gathering tidal wave, as a small petal of the datura stramonium. Such is the suggestive power of shape, when unanchored to any sense of scale.
Because he is a colorist through-and-through, Shankman traces his artistic legacy from the brush of Vincent Van Gogh, through Odilon Redon and Georgia O’Keefe, rather than the camera of Imogen Cunningham and Irving Penn. He makes an exception, though, for painter-photographer Edward Steichen, whose 1914 image, Heavy Roses, set a high bar for floral photography.
Shankman’s connection with painting is evident in the way he approaches his images, using them not as records of fact but as armatures to build on. Stripping the original tones from a sunflower, daisy or dahlia, he replaces them with the colors of his emotions. In Oz, he turns a tiny yellow flower emerald green, sharpening its deep red stamen until they seem to comprise the features of a face popping out of the underbrush, washed by the artist with the color of wine.
From photography’s earliest days, people have debated its role. Did it compete with painting? Was it a craft, or an equally important but more modern art? Digital technology has helped clarify our thinking. If it were ever possible to separate photographs from paintings, prints from drawings, the real from the imagined, it no longer is. Like today’s other cutting edge art, Shankman’s work demands that we put aside those categories and experience it on our own terms. These poetic images have a life of their own.