The Japanese word for fireworks is hanabi---hana meaning “flower” and bi meaning “fire.” Sarah Illenberger only recently learned this, but it’s a fitting coincidence because she's spent the last year making flowers "explode" in her studio. With a little lighting and ingenuity, her vibrant photos take floral arrangement to a new level.
The idea for Flowerwork came to her while walking through a flower shop in Berlin, where she lives. The rainbow of colors and various blooming shapes immediately reminded her of fireworks splintering in the sky. “It was like one of those moments where you’re stuck by lightning. I immediately knew this was the idea I’d been looking for,” she says.
To make these flowers of fire, Illenberger studied firework patterns before scouring flower shops and markets. She eventually filled her studio with flora of all shapes, sizes and colors and spent hours arranging them. Some arrangements came together easily, while others had to be painstakingly assembled. To make the flowers look like they were exploding, Illenberger or her assistant would gently shake or tip the backdrop to create a motion blur. Then she photographed the arrangement a second time as still life and combined the images digitally to give them extra oomph.
All the lighting was done with a flashlight and the exposures often took 30 seconds. What appears to be smoke is actually the flashlight moving across the backdrop, which was patched together with several kinds of material and black tape. The process was a big experiment. “Making it all work involved a lot of trial and error,” Illenberger says.
The photographer wasn’t trying to trick the eye. Illenberger likes that the arrangements obviously resemble fireworks, but it’s important that viewers still recognize them as flowers.
“The in-between path was the perfect path,” she says. “When you close your eyes (a little) you see fireworks, but if you look closely you see flowers.”
