If it shatters, let it shatter. Why keep chasing perfection?

I wonder if you have this habit too. Anyway, when I was little, I liked to keep faded petals, carefully press them into a notebook, and could not bear to throw them away. Because even faded petals can remind people of how lovely they once looked, and of the good mood they once brought me.

Beauty is fleeting. After a flower is gone, is there anything it can still leave us? Do you remember what they looked like when they faded? Today, let's talk about this topic.

The protagonist of this topic, Jon Shireman, is a photographer from New York. He did an experiment: freeze flowers, then find a way to shatter them, and use his lens to record what the flowers looked like once broken.

Photograph

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Ed Sheeran 

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{Miss Peony Vol.738 }

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Shattered flowers through the lens

We are used to understanding flowers within the scope of traditional still-life painting, but photographers seem gifted at "stirring things up." They like to break conventions, dig out the aesthetics behind things, and use cameras to capture "defamiliarized" frozen moments.

For example, like this

like this

or like this

This is the photographerJon Shireman's work. He photographed flowers before and after they were shattered, as a comparison.

We are used to seeing flowers decline and wither, but rarely see them shattered. Flowers themselves are soft and resilient. Even if you rub them in your palm, the petals will only fade and curl.

Making flowers instantly turn into a colorful shattered state is obviously not easy. First, they need to become "absolutely fragile."

This series, titled "Shattered Flowe," is currently Jon Shireman's most popular work.

How do you make flowers "absolutely fragile"? The answer is:liquid nitrogen. Yes, the very liquid that can quickly freeze a person solid.

After freezing the collected fresh flowers with liquid nitrogen, Jon Shireman placed them in a container with a spring mechanism, then used the impact force of the spring's high-speed movement to shatter the flowers. For example, lilies.

The English name for lily is Lily,

which sounds like an innocent little girl.

The white petals make her look like a cute porcelain doll.

And now, her petals are shattered,

like the broken porcelain pieces after a porcelain doll is smashed.

Through the screen, we can almost hear her "bòng" as she hits the ground.

Grape hyacinth is quiet and elegant, and likes warmth and coolness.

Her flowers are usually small, with a fresh fragrance

and she blooms in small flowers like bunches of grapes.

And now, her stem is shattered into segments

and the flowers have become individual beads,

which from a distance look like a Pop Art oil painting.

This kind ofpoetic experiment extracted from science and technologyis, in Jon Shireman's own view, very interesting.

The inlay of fragments with fragments expresses people's fascination with imperfection and aesthetics.

This creative idea has also been recognized abroad, and "Shattered Flowers" has been used by many fashion brands in clothing design.

Carolina Herrera Spring 2015

Akrisofficial floral series,

and I have to say, it actually looks quite good.

But not everyone can accept the artificial destruction of flowers. Compared with a different kind of beauty of imperfection, most people would rather see a sense of complete beauty.

Jon Shireman is someone obsessed with "the aesthetics of brokenness." He also created another series of broken works, and the object being broken was glass.

Glass shattered against all kinds of backgrounds and under all kinds of light,

quietly conveying a sense of motion.

If the previous series shattered flowers into bits,

then this series shattered glass into a flower.

Viewed in comparison, the two series have a beauty of strong contrast.

As a photographic artist,

Jon Shireman must maintain his desire to create and his curiosity.

He also photographed a series showing the process of flowers withering,

and perhaps it is precisely because of this that he began to want to know,

what kind of visual effect does a perfect appearance produce after it is shattered?

Perhaps it is the bleak beauty of vanishing into smoke.

He recorded it, so that more people could see it.

END