Florilegio, 2011

Jose Iraola says, "I have always conducted my photographic experiments with a painterly eye. This particular image belongs to a series I have been working on for several years titled Florilegio (An Anthology), a selection of flower images taken with a broken camera. There's no other kind of manipulation except for the one produced by the technical imperfections of the machine. These conceptual explorations look far more like watercolors or pastel paintings than a photograph. This complex relationship among mediums remains constant in my work."

The distorted flower photographs of Florilegio, taken in Iraola's garden in Miami with a defective Canon digital camera, have a unique pictorial quality formed by layers of vibrant colors, deformed shapes, and lush textures that are beautiful and unexpected.

Though he began his art career in painting, once Jose Iraola encountered photography by chance, he never looked back. His two part series Memoria Televisia is highly personal: many of the images stem from his own Latin background and are taken from Spanish reality TV shows of questionable taste, while other images are informed by his passion for film. Iraola shot well-known moments in the history of American film and decontextualized them by including their corresponding English subtitles, resulting in work that takes on a completely different psycho-sexual meaning with humor and political commentary.

Just as he planned to record his love of gardening, Iraola's Canon digital camera broke. After attempting to fix the light sensor, he decided he liked the resulting images. He had formed layers of vibrant colors, deformed shapes, and lush textures. "I noticed there was this distortion. Pictorial in nature and almost like a painting," he says. "Control was the challenge." So commenced a body of work called Florilegio, a compilation of southern Florida flowers in Iraola's backyard in Miami's Coconut Grove.

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