We humans orient ourselves through images, both physical and mental. By staging and immortalizing parts of our lives, we can take control over the image we present to ourselves and others, influencing how the world will remember us. Perhaps it's a way to deal with the transience of life?

Drawing from family albums spanning from the 1930s to the 2000s, I have collected photographs with a consistent theme: people posing with flowers. The flowers are gifts from friends on birthdays or tokens of appreciation for completing duties at work.Photographing a person with flowers has a certain ritualistic and theatrical quality. Ritualistic because you repeat a pattern within your own family and culture. Theatrical because you transform a part of your living space into a stage, where roles are played out and measured in the number of flowers. These photographs evoke Renaissance still life paintings, where flowers and fruit symbolize the mortality of life. In many of the pictures, a clock is also present in the background, indicating that time goes by, with or without us.