“Your World for a Moment”

Photos by David Krohne
Text by Steve Charles

“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for a moment.”

Georgia O’Keefe said that, and she walked the talk. Her paintings of flowers, so carefully and lovingly observed, are worlds our eyes and imaginations walk into and breathed in.

My wife, CJ, would freak at the comparison, but I feel much the same when I look at her own watercolors of irises. All that time holding, studying, rendering that flower, she sees something I missed. And because she took the time to paint it, I’ll never look at an iris the same way again.

Ecologist, writer and photographer David Krohne would cringe and protest at having any of his photographs considered art. I understand and respect that, too, and I’m looking forward to more conversation about it with Dave, Doug Calisch, and others in the pages of the The New Platypus Review this fall. 

But for now, I’ll just say that if O’Keefe’s paintings give us new worlds, Dave’s photographs give me a new way to see our own. They’ve sent me out into previously unknown places to try to experience and understand what he has seen and studied for years—there’s so much life out here—and those different angles have brought new light to my world and a deeper appreciation of living here in the temperate zone and the Midwest. 

No more so than in this series of black and white conversions of his color slides of prairie flowers. Dave, who loves the “riotous color” of a prairie fragment in bloom, also noticed that “color is so overriding in prairie—but in black and white, the texture comes through.”

And if you’ve visited these prairies, you know—texture is a big part of the experience. You wade in like it’s a sea of plant life, and it reaches out sometimes gently, sometime with razor sharp thorns. And when you kneel or lie down to get a photo, you’re likely to pay. If not immediately, later that night when you take off your clothes and see all the scrapes and chigger bites on your body!

Maybe because I’m hearing impaired and the silence of the woods and open spaces has become little different than the silence of so many others, the sensual experience of the prairie enlivens me. Insects chatter vociferously; birds sing, swoop, and, if you’re lucky, graze your cheek and hum; fragrances rise like incense, changing with every few steps; the stems of plants and crawling vines trip you up if you don’t lift your feet; stick-tights leap onto your clothes; and even the brambles and thistles occasionally get in a good spiny lick. Prairies are the sensory rock concerts of the natural world.

All those textures forced on you also make you aware of how light glints off it all, and I’ve found myself circling compass plants or blazing star or prairie dock and just watching that light play. 

These black and white photos (you’ll find more in The Platypus’s “Look” gallery) let me feel that all over again, reveal some of that light play I missed. Dave shot these as slides years ago, while also doing field work, back when an ISO over 400 was pretty much unheard of unless you pushed it (with all that resulting grain). These plants were carefully and lovingly observed too.

I’m excited for you to see them, honored to share them.