On one of my last mornings in Rome, I woke early and walked to the Roseto Comunale — a public rose garden on the Aventine Hill that, on that particular day, was wrapped in mist and a soft rain that came and went. The sunlight broke through in intervals, the kind of light that only exists when the weather can't make up its mind, and I spent nearly four hours there with my Hasselblad, moving slowly through the roses. What stopped me the longest was not a bloom but what comes after — rose hips, the fruit produced once the flower has gone, seeds of the next cycle already forming inside. I leaned in as close as I could while keeping them in focus, aiming to draw out the quietness of their stillness. That moment now lives in the upper compartment of a late 19th century European trumeau mirror, replacing what was once a botanical painting with a botanical photograph — one era of image-making quietly succeeding another, while the frame and mirror hold the weight and honesty of what has come before. The mirror below does what mirrors do, but imperfectly — its glass worked in the églomisé tradition, gilded from behind and weathered by age into something silvered and fogged, the viewer's image returned to them altered. To stand before Budding is to see yourself through the lens of everything that has already passed, while looking up at what is quietly preparing to begin. Deterioration and renewal occupy the same frame, neither canceling the other out. This piece is part of Bright Ruin (2025), my series of over 45 unique works shot entirely on analog film over the course of 10 days in Rome, and first exhibited at Gallery ATARAH in September 2025.
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