Paper Flowers examines themes of love, memory, and contemporary masculinity through the alternative photographic process of lumen printing. Each piece records the ephemeral gesture of gifting flowers to my wife—domestic, everyday offerings recontextualized as material traces of affection. Subjected to time, light, and chemical transformation, these works function as photographic reliquaries, preserving impermanence through a process that resists precision and embraces unpredictability. Some of the prints remain unfixed, allowing them to continue changing and fading over time—echoing the transient nature of memory and emotion they seek to represent.
Titled after late '90s and early 2000s emo songs, the series navigates a tension between personal nostalgia and cultural critique. This genre of music, with its heightened emotional register and confessional tone, shaped a generation’s understanding of intimacy and vulnerability. It offered men permission to feel deeply while simultaneously romanticizing emotional instability. Love was often rendered as ache, absence, or collapse—romance as both salvation and destruction. These lyrical narratives became formative scripts for how relationships, desire, and identity were performed and internalized.
In contrast, the work frames care and mutual support as quiet forms of strength. As a house husband, I inhabit a role historically excluded from traditional masculine archetypes. Within this context, the act of giving flowers becomes both ritual and resistance—a modest but potent expression of emotional labor and shared life. The prints register these moments, not as grand gestures, but as durational acts—each one an index of intimacy and transformation.
The lumen process itself operates as a conceptual metaphor. Exposures unfold slowly, allowing for nuanced shifts in tone and form. Chemical reactions produce chromatic and material unpredictability, situating the work between control and chance. The resulting images hover between the photographic and the painterly, the documentary and the abstract—suggesting not only what was seen, but what was felt.
These works reclaim the emotional intensity of youth and reframe it within a softer, more sustainable framework. The project is a meditation on domesticity, vulnerability, and the evolving architectures of masculinity. It honors not just the flower as symbol, but the act of giving—the gesture, the hand, the relationship, and the lived experience embedded in the image.
