SUPERMODELS

When you first step into Keukenhof Garden, flowers of many types, mostly tulips, dispel scents so gentle and sights so refreshing you almost feel as if you’ve landed onto another world altogether, a world which instills a sense of gratitude at the sheer magnificence laying bare around you.

So if you happen to be a photographer, your initial dizziness eventually makes way for an urge to snap in all directions, knowing that you would have to be a very unlucky fellow not to come out with some pretty remembrance of this literal Eden.

So I did just that, snapping and snapping again for hours in a row while wandering all over the garden until my legs begged for mercy, which forced me to run back to my hotel and quickly process a few dozens of my captures into vibrant, colorful memories, which I then uploaded and felt great joy at sharing online because, well, they were beautiful pictures of beautiful flowers…

Except that they were all too common beautiful pictures of beautiful flowers, the likes of which any person with any type of camera in this very garden could and probably did take, and does so every March, every year, when Keukenhof Garden welcomes its millions of annual visitors.

So what was I to do with my own dozens and dozens of takes? Well, around the time I was asking myself this question, I had decided to dabble into studio portraiture and had called upon a few female acquaintances to stand as models for my new collection. This is when it occurred to me, upon further reviewing my Keukenhof macros, that some of these flowers bore expressive and relatable stances similar to those of models, especially when they were ridden of their natural colors and presented into monochrome pictures.

This is how my supermodels were born and how I decided to baptize each flower I had selected with a name and a trait paying homage to what I felt were their inner qualities, as in the women they reminded me of, famous or unknown, the whole ordeal attesting of my personal appreciation of Keukenhof with, I hope, some kind of originality.