Artist Statement
A few weeks before my 75th birthday in 2024, two large changes collided in my life. The first was being gifted a fabulous new camera system that was perfect for “focus stacking” the flower images I had been drawn to shoot for 25 years. The second was the shock of learning that I had stage 3 ovarian cancer and would undergo major surgery 3 days after my birthday. This operation would then be followed by 6 rounds of chemotherapy.
I could have been consumed with fear and anxiety about all of my health issues, but instead, I put as much energy as I could into learning my new camera system and using it to engage with the beautiful flowers I brought home to photograph in my small studio. Though my cancer and treatment regime were unexpected and quite challenging, the flowers I photographed using this technique ended up coming to the rescue for me and became part of a miraculous source of healing.
Focus stacking lets you create extreme closeup photographs that are in sharp focus all across that image. When you shoot just one photograph of a subject this closely, only a sliver of it will be in focus. A way around this limitation is to use the technique of focus stacking. It involves taking multiple pictures of the same subject, with each of these multiple images having a slightly different tiny sliver of the picture being in focus. Then these multiple pictures are processed using special software that combines each of the tiny slivers into a composite final image that is in focus all over, sometimes involving as many as 200 individual photos.
The extreme close-up views I’m able to shoot with this technique remind me of how an insect or hummingbird might see the inside of flowers, so I think of each pair of images in this show as a two-beat story, with an extreme close-up “hummingbird” view, and a more normal “human” view, of the same flower.
Chemotherapy was not easy, but putting my energy into this project kept me from turning my attention to worry, anxiety, pain, and angst about my cancer treatment; it kept me focused on the joy of making art: resting when I needed to, and creating when I had the energy for it.
A friend who is a web developer wanted to help me through this challenging time, and she collaborated with me to create a beautiful website, where these close-up flower pictures that provide so much healing for me can be shared with others who will also love them. If these images speak to you, I invite you to visit the website we made together at https://jeanneschlesinger.com .
