Efflorescence

• Photographer
  Sam Peach, United Kingdom

Efflorescence is a series of diptych portraits featuring young
unknown male models paired with cut flowers. The series was
made in response to hedonistic, care-free depictions of youth
often constructed by photographers for fashion and style
magazines.

The young men, modern day Adonises, are juxtaposed with
flowers - symbols of ephemeral beauty that intimate a fragility
rarely associated with male youth. Although others have
explored links between men and flowers these images are
usually sexual in nature and depict youth as a period of vitality,
extroversion and celebration. In these diptychs the two
photographs align in subtler and more tenuous ways: a model’s
armpit hair, the curve of a lip or the arc of his back are reflected
in the flower. There is a melancholia which reflects on what will
fade rather than what will reproduce.