Capturing the soul of a flower

African Daisy 1, the work of flower-lover Tara Jahn-WernerPHOTO/SUPPLIED

The soul of a flower is captured in Floribunda, an exhibition of flower macro-photography by Tara Jahn-Werner.

The exhibition will be held at Hollard Gardens, near Kaponga in South Taranaki, in late October, as part of the Powerco Taranaki Garden Spectacular.

Ms Jahn-Werner's love of flowers is the main impetus behind her macro-photography.

"I aim to communicate the bold, energetic, colourful and often mysterious elegance of each bloom, attempting to capture the soul of each flower. Above all, their stillness.

"I use a small Leica digital travel camera to photograph them in situ, in friends' gardens or spontaneously on the side of roads when travelling. Many images have been taken in the Taranaki area," she said.

Last year, two of Ms Jahn-Werner's photographs won the first and second prizes in the Dunedin Botanic Garden Photography Competition. Such a result was rare in the competition's history.

She will be giving a talk on her exhibition on November 2 at 2pm, at the Hollard Event Centre.

"I like to think I come from a well-established tradition of photographers and artists, all of whom have focused on flowers at some stage in their work," she says. Four in particular - Ernst Hass, Imogen Cunningham, Robert Mapplethorpe and the painter Georgia O'Keefe - have had a direct influence and provided creative stimulus to her exhibition.

"Especially Hass, who devoted the last 10 years of his life to the study of Buddhism, and suggested that the entire universe can be contained within a flower."