Review: In ‘Big Blooms,’ a flower isn’t just a flower

Bottom line: Arresting images of flowers indebted to portraiture and fashion photography.

New York-based photographer Paul Lange is one of many artists who have embraced the beauty, drama and suggestively human qualities in flowers. Among them was Georgia O’Keeffe, whose vivid paintings famously created parallels between lush, colorful flowers and female anatomy.

It’s an idea Lange continues to some extent in his “Big Blooms” solo show at Hagedorn Foundation Gallery, which also suggests an analogy for the graceful, elegant female form in his photographs of peonies and roses.

Renowned fashion photographer Irving Penn also created striking images of flowers beginning in the 1960s set against white backgrounds, essentially translating the conventions of high-fashion photography to botanicals. Less well-known, photographer Andrew Zuckerman’s book “Flower” demonstrates the remarkable variety in an array of flower species also shot against a crisp white backdrop.

But the progenitor of all of this striking flower photography is Penn. Penn occasionally highlighted imperfection: the browned underside of a rose, stems supporting withered or missing petals or the humble stem on an extraordinary flower. But Lange is into a level of perfection deeply indebted to fashion photography where extraordinary clothes and extraordinarily beautiful models exist in a fantastical universe that can seem far removed from our own.

If Lange’s flowers are stand-ins for women, they suggest impeccably groomed, quite exceptional women, a special caste not unlike these blooms themselves, which have their own extraordinary provenance. Lange sources the exquisite flowers he photographs from Manhattan florist to celebs and high society Zeze. Lange’s blooms are devoid of imperfection, in perfect, lush bloom, their sturdy, unremarkable stems and leaves rarely entering into the frame to distract from the spectacle of their brilliantly colored powerhouse petals. The flowers become as singular as the faces in portraiture.

The singularity of these poppies, roses, irises and anemones is emphasized by Lange’s naming of his photographs for women: Vivien, Laura, Rachel, Coco, which also plays upon the botanical cultivator’s convention of naming flowers for significant people.

Lange’s photographs undeniably elucidate the marvels of nature: the delicate ribbing and veins of flower petals, the strange and beautiful pollen-dipped anthers projecting out from the bloom, the gradations from the tight bloom at the center of flowers to the unfolding, delicate layers of petals.

Like Penn, Lange shoots his flowers against a white backdrop reminiscent of the perfect, clean void of the fashion studio set meant to make everything but the model and clothes extraneous. Against that spotless white slate, the colors of the flowers erupt: melon-orange poppies and bone china delicate roses and rich lipstick-colored maroon peonies.

Lange’s career in fashion shooting for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Glamour serves him well as he documents the dusting of yellow pollen coating the pink peony petals — so suggestive of a flamenco dancer’s skirt — in “Paulina.” Lange documents the intense shades of purple and black in an anemone photo titled “Laura.” A fragile dusting of purple pollen against the white petals of “Laura” suggests makeup falling on shoulders.

Multiple analogies beyond the female form and personality spring to mind when examining these beautiful blooms. The veined and pillowy texture of the petals of these flowers, for instance, often conjures up the delicacy of skin. But it is fashion that the blooms most often evoke, and the frothy, gossamer texture of fabrics: the taffetas, velvets and filmy silks that define high fashion. The peonies especially have the dense but ethereal look of ball gowns miraculously balanced onto a slender stalk, not unlike a glamorous woman dressed for a night on the town, suspended on precarious high heels.

The work exhibits incredible skill and undeniable beauty even if it lacks what might be termed passion. Like fashion photography, it revels in an eye-pleasing loveliness even if it falls short of the lingering impact of other treatments of the botanical world in art.