This picture was conceived in response to a Kodak competition called "Colours of the Coming Age". I felt the "coming age" was the yet unborn children, and wanted to picture the hope for a better environment for them. I needed a kind of nuclear wasteland background so I used a photograph I had taken down near Aramoana, a half hour drive from here. It was taken approximately one week after a gunman committed mass murder there, killing 13 people in a tiny and peaceful seaside community, and I wanted to express my shock and sadness about that, hence the bleakness.
The figure was a friend of mine, four days before she gave birth to her twin daughters.
The flowers were brought in to work by a colleague, and as soon as I saw them I realised they were the element needed to complete the image, having as they did a sort of "exploding into life" quality, and being so colouful in the otherwise relatively colourless background.
Funnily enough, after I had split and flipped the background, necessary to fit it into the lighting of the figure, I found that it too, contained a very female shape, ie, breasts, and a vagina, signifying the previous generation before the woman.
This was never used for the original concept, as one of the requirements of the competition was that the image had to be on Kodak film, and the digital to film printer I had access to was only set up for Agfa film.. C'est la vie!
Pam... I want to thank you for the nice words about my glowing thisle... After looking at your work I can see why it attracted you... I really like your images , fresh vision and bold colors thta you are using....keep it up... Mike
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