Henrik Duncker
BLOOM

Most of Finns have a summer cottage or a garden. I have neither, and I live in a blockhouse. During the last 18 years I have spent summers in a Latvian village and there our "summer cottage" is a flat in a blockhouse. However, each flat has a backyard garden where people grow berries, fruits, and vegetables. And of course flowers, mostly for adorning graves. (Well, at least my mother-in-law grew them for that purpose).

One evening I took a couple of random flower pictures, but didn't think much of it. It was only later that I registered the multitude and soon I was stupefied by the vitality of the backyard gardens. I wanted to see how flowers look if photographed with a flash in daylight.

This was about eight years back. For long I didn't know how to use the pictures – until the pandemic transmuted our life. When various restrictions had kept us in limbo for months, I thought now is the time to wake the series from dead and make a little book of flower pictures. Bloom!