In his series titled Botanical Inquiry, Sydney-based photographer Daniel Shipp captures gloomy scenarios of beautiful plants and flowers surrounded by typical elements of the urban environment.
Botanical Inquiry is a series of photographic dioramas that shuffle nature, geography, and physics into familiar but fictional environments. In these compositions the physical characteristics of the unremarkable plants I have collected become storytelling elements which, when staged against the backdrop of common urban environments, explore the quietly menacing effect that humans have on the natural world. From a subjective and ambiguous point of view, we witness the plants ability to adapt and survive. By manipulating the optical and staging properties of photography with an analog machine that I have constructed, I have produced these studio based images in-camera rather using Photoshop compositing. They rely exclusively on the singular perspective of the camera to render their mechanics invisible.
Daniel Shipp