For more information please visit www.lulaalvarez.com.
All images are copyrighted unless otherwise, and are not to be used without permission.
Lula Alvarez, Museums Researcher /Photographer. She has been taking photographs since she can remember first with her father’s different cameras, the Voigtlander or the successive Canons he had. But it really started when at 15 years old she received as a birthday present her own camera: a Kodak Pocket Instamatic. She new immediately the love affaire was for ever!
Her photos at first were of personal value: home, family portraits and events, but also of historic value. At that time she was living abroad, in Arab countries, and there was an impulsive need to document everything so she could always remember. “Photography for me was, and still is, personal, about building a personal archive. But it turned out to be also an indispensable professional tool.
In the past 20 years the camera has been a vital tool for documenting cultural life, ideas and concepts in research, creating intellectual statements, presenting portraits of social or aesthetic behaviours and trends. Creating a body of images has been essential part of her work, especially used within the context of museum work. Actually, the interest in garden and landscape photography started as part of a research for an exhibition some twelve years ago.
She learned gardening early in her life, and was more than a hobby. In recent years, she has also developed an interest for a closer look at nature and has started to to develop macro-photography of some subjects related to botanical world: gardens, plants, flora and trees, botanical gardens, nurseries, etc., both in studio and outdoors in their natural habitat. It is not only a study for botanical purposes, but an abstraction of color and forms: "sometimes there is a fade of lines and contours, an evanescence of the idea of the subject, as a way of portraying the essence of flowers, plants, trees or landscaping gardening"
I am very honored that Jean's Garden (Jean Potuchek) recommended this blog in her monthly post of "blogs to watch":
I am very much a word person and have a strong preference for blogs that are more word-based than image-based, but I make an exception for On Botanical Photography. Lula Alvarez, the creative genius behind this blog, is a professional photographer whose botanical photographs are stunningly beautiful. Most of her images are macro shots, and their composition sometimes resembles abstract art. But these photos are careful botanical studies. Plants are carefully identified, and the images often provide extraordinary detail that leads me to look at familiar plants in a whole new way. For those of us whose winter landscapes are predominantly white and grey, the intense colors of Lula’s images (even those of plants in snow) make the spirits soar. Although this blog is several months old, relatively few people seem to have discovered it. If you are one of those who have not, check it out; you won’t be disappointed.I am also honnored that another fellow blogger Charlotte in Charlotte's The Galloping Gardener has recommend this blog recently:
Two new blogs that celebrate plants at their finest are On Botanical Photography, where every posting features a photograph with details of the featured plant, ..... are featured in my side bar because I like to check them out daily - just for the eye candy - and you can also follow them on Blotanical.