Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Azuma Makoto’s Photographs of Bouquets Sent Into Space

Azuma Makoto’s known for his ambitious flower art, manipulating nature into something new, yet still maintaining its beauty. With the “In Bloom” project, he’s taken his sensibilities to space. Makoto’s been sending bouquets to space with specialized balloon vehicles and cameras. The result is something that combines the inherent exquisiteness of the Earth and its surrounding bodies.


Azuma Makoto’s known for his ambitious flower art, manipulating nature into something new, yet still maintaining its beauty. With the “In Bloom” project, he’s taken his sensibilities to space. Makoto’s been sending bouquets to space with specialized balloon vehicles and cameras. The result is something that combines the inherent exquisiteness of the Earth and its surrounding bodies.

Makoto offers some insight into how this incarnation of the series had to be planned: “For this installment, the subject – the flowers – will be significantly larger and heavier than in our first installment,” the artist wrote. “Weighing approximately 6kg with a diameter of approximately 1.5m, we will launch this huge ‘bouquet’ from the Love Lock Desert of Nevada, US. The bouquet will then be arranged around the structure of the Earth. Although we were previously not able to due to the weight limit, for this project we will be using a medium-format mirrorless camera to best capture the process of change and movement in the flowers in full clarity. The ever-changing landscape of the flowers, the changes in lighting and contrast from the direct rays from the sun, the ways in the which the flowers will react in an environment of -60°C, and the way in which they will scatter and fall back to the ground… we will record this epic documentary of the flowers’ progress from ground to heavens, and back.”

Makoto was last featured on HiFructose.com here. See past experiments with “In Bloom” below.

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
The aspects of William Mortensen’s photography that were controversial during his lifetime—clever manipulation of imagery and dark themes—are now considered to be marks of his greatness. In the show "Witches" at Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick, Stephen Romano Gallery offers both unseen work and iconic meditations on the occult from his output in the 1920s and ’30s. The exhibition runs August 3 through November 3 at the venue in Cleveland, Ohio.
Joanne Leah is a mysterious photographer from Brooklyn who takes unnerving photographs with erotic elements that simultaneously attract and repulse the viewer. Her latest series, "Acid Mass," features a variety of models wearing highly stylized accessories. Posing in front of solid-colored studio backgrounds that match their outfits, the models' bodies function more like design elements than fully fledged characters. With their faces often obscured, their body shapes interact with Leah's surreal props in often disturbing ways.
The word "wallflower" was first used in the early 1800s to refer to a woman without a partner at a dance, presumably sitting against the wall. Today, it represents any person who appears or feels shy and awkward. Southern California based artist Janine Brown captures the feeling of being a wallflower in her dream-like series of pinhole camera portraits, titled "The Wallflower Project."
Photographer Davide Luciano's "Sheep Nation" series abandons the use of digital tricks and implements prosthetic make-up, meticulous lighting, and several models and crew members to create surreal scenes. Each of the mask applications took up to three hours to apply, and photos from the series move between stirring portraits and scenes from the everyday.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List