yellow Paris tulip dead[pan overhead water ripples

The Vanitas series revisits the still life tradition through an underwater photographic process, extending a lineage that emerged most prominently in seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Working entirely in water, these compositions draw on historical motifs associated with mortality, transience, and the passage of time.

Floral specimens, organic matter, and carefully selected objects are staged within a submerged environment where light, reflection, and refraction soften form and disrupt fixed edges. Subtle currents and wave energy introduce gentle distortions, allowing subjects to hover within a darkened field that neither intrudes upon nor overwhelms their presence.

Historically, Vanitas imagery employed decaying fruit, cut flowers, precious materials, and symbolic objects to confront viewers with the inevitability of death and the futility of material excess. In this series, those themes are rearticulated through water, which operates simultaneously as symbol and method.

Water functions as both nurturer and destroyer, capable of preservation and erasure in equal measure. Its transient nature exposes fragility, slowing perception and transforming still life into a temporal event rather than a static arrangement. Through submersion, familiar symbols are rendered unstable, suspended between appearance and disappearance.

Produced entirely in-camera, the Vanitas works are not constructed illusions but records of real, physical conditions unfolding over time. Within The Legacy Collection, they form a sustained meditation on impermanence, material desire, and the fragile balance between beauty and loss in contemporary life.

All images in this series are available as rights-managed works for editorial, institutional, and creative use.