Stains of Color

Diana Gaston, Independent Curator

For some time he kept these pictures to himself. He did not even share them with the person who inspired their making. These were private exposures, frames filled to brimming with emotion.
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Flowers have long served as surrogates for the human form-their muscular perfection and tireless grace serve the photographer well. Few photographers working at this point in our history could muster the courage to make such sensuous, emotional photographs of flowers. For those who do, they have the historical weight of earlier photographers to deal with-such as the angular and verdant plant studies of modernist photographer Imogen Cunningham, or the fleshy blossoms photographed by Tina Modotti in the 1920s. Even within the last quarter century there are scores of heroic flower studies to absorb-such as the erotic intensity of Robert Mapplethorpe's still lifes, or the cool, restrained elegance of Kenro Izu's platinum prints. It's crowded territory. It is a difficult subject to handle with new insight, and even more difficult to give such exquisite forms an edge. This is precisely why Yamrus kept these images to himself-for fear that his intensely personal flower studies would be dismissed as too gorgeous, or too sentimental. Perhaps what gives these secret images their strength is that they were made with complete disregard for historic precedent; he shirks the modernist treatment of flowers altogether, abandoning its mantle like a discarded dress on the floor.

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@2000Diana Gaston