Jeff Mermelstein: Flowers in the Street
Jeff Mermelstein’s new book, What if Jeff were a butterfly, digs into the photographer’s archive, considering street photography less as a profession and more as a way of inhabiting the world.
By Gaia Squarci. Photographs by Jeff Mermelstein.
The project began with more than two hundred close up photographs of flowers, images often dismissed as amateurish unless approached through a very specific and narrow aesthetic, and largely ignored by street photographers altogether. Taken without a set style or clear intention, Mermelstein’s flower photographs are simply the result of paying attention, looking with openness and curiosity.
Throughout the book, these images are intertwined with street photographs drawn from his archive. The sequence moves quickly from a person’s glance to whatever catches the eye moments later. The rhythm is restless and instinctive, like the one of a butterfly drifting from one point of attention to the next. The book is mostly built around diptychs and resists a fixed structure. At times the pages ask to be turned horizontally, making the act of looking more physical.
Anyone who has spent time navigating the photography industry feels the weight of unwritten rules shaping how images are made and read. How to “make sense of things”, how to perceive and interiorize a family photograph, an iPhone snapshot, a dynamic street scene, dew resting on a flower’s petals. This book breaks with those schemes, treating photographs as part of the author’s life rather than as assets within his profession.
Butterflies are pollinators. In a similar way, photographers gather bits of places, people, and emotions and release them into the world as images. What those images set in motion, the connections they create, the reactions they provoke, is never fully predictable.
The book What if Jeff were a butterfly is published by VOID and available at the price of €50.
