My brother Michael was dying of AIDS. The day before I photographed these flowers I had had what each of us knew was very likely to be our last visit together. It was hard to leave, and due to work commitments, impossible to stay.

The next day, I found myself attracted to these flowers in the median of the highway in North Carolina. I stopped for a closer look at the bloom-filled expanse. When taking a closer look with a camera, I saw these two blooms – one vibrant, the other dying – interlocked, each affecting the other. In the frame, the flowers captured what I felt. It was not simply a photograph of my brother and I, but a statement of the interconnectedness of the living and the dying, life and death, and in some way touched on the communion of saints. My brother died two days later.

After the funeral, the slides came back and this image still felt like it spoke to me. I took the slide and copied it onto Polaroid film. I heated and then flash cooled the print to remove the emulsion from the paper backing. Then still working in water, I caught the emulsion on a piece of heavy watercolor paper. The emulsion transfer process lent an additional feeling of fragility and flux to the flower photograph.

The Rev. Frank Logue

email: frank@kingofpeace.org
web: www.planetanimals.com/logue/

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