HEALING VISIONS

Images of nature inspire poetic effusions in Boscov’s collection of pics, accompanied by pensées written by various authors.

The photographer presents 52 of her images, each paired with a short literary vignette by a writer responding to Boscov’s picture. Her primary subject is flowers, rendered in vivid color in lush pond settings, where a blossom may emerge from or stretch out over water on its slender stalk, connected to its reflection by a single pristine droplet. She also works in black and white and artfully processed mixes (the mystical title photograph shows a bright pink-and-white blossom hovering in an inky void over a woman’s face conjured from gray mist). Other favored themes include brightly colored seascapes and grandly austere images of saguaro cacti in the Sonoran Desert lifting their arms in harsh sunlight against a black sky. There’s a feeling of serenity and classical poise in her compositions, sometimes chilly but usually warmed by glowing colors; sometimes she unsettles her pictures by blurring the images at the edges or depicting sweeps of foliage overlain by scratches and sparkles to suggest anxious unrest. The writers respond to these beautifully open-ended images with impressionistic prose poems. Pietra Dunmore likens a snowy white hellebore to a woman putting on makeup (“The look is like music, jazz—a red lip, a winged line on the eye”). A neon-blue aquilegia blossom prompts Tama Janowitz’s whimsically surreal vision of flowers falling on a deranged city neighborhood (“Leaning out the windows, no one could stop themselves from grabbing handfuls, biting yellow tennis ball fluff. ‘What’s going on?’ occurred to everyone around the same time, suddenly munching more slowly”). An abstract picture of gnarled, black tree limbs enmeshed in shimmering scrub provokes Bonnie Jo Campbell’s bleak observation on the cycle of life (“kindness in youth can be simple, sweet; later, kindness is often the kindness of the sharp knife”). The result is a feast for the eyes and a set of beguiling ruminations on its rich variety.

Sublime botanical visuals elicit haunting meditations on the evanescence of beauty.