A journal note on patience, poppies, and photographing from above

Poppies do not open on command.

I bought several bunches at the flower market — poppies grown by local farmers, arriving still closed. I put them in vases, left them in the studio, and waited. Two days later they had opened into something completely different from what arrived — full, generous, slightly chaotic in the way poppies always are, growing in whatever direction felt right to them.

That quality — the refusal to be neatly directed — is part of what makes poppies so worth photographing. You cannot arrange a poppy the way you arrange a peony or a ranunculus. It arranges itself. All you can do is notice what it has decided to become.

When they were fully open I gathered the vases together and looked down. Photographed from directly above against a pure black surface, the poppies became something else entirely — not a naturalistic field photograph but something more painterly, more considered. The red against the black has a particular intensity that a lighter background never creates. Each bloom holds its own space in the frame, the stems curling wherever they chose to go, the composition formed entirely by the flowers themselves.

This is one of my favorite ways to work. Not designing the image but discovering it. Waiting until the subject is ready and then simply looking at what is there.

-Hürriyet