Kirby Jones: Photographing Natural Beauty

By Lisa Orgler in Featured Artists > Photography

Kirby Jones has been a practicing multidisciplinary professional artist for over 19 years. He is a self-proclaimed designer, maker and photographer who specializes in contemporary furniture, large format photographs, and interactive environments.

Kirby is especially well known for his re-purposed, streamlined furniture, but today I’d like to focus his other talent—photography.

Kirby1

Kirby showcases his passion for the environment in both his furniture design and his captivating images. He beautifully describes his photographic collection as “a pictorial inventory of natural specimens.”

In a very real sense, the images he collects are his own modern interpretation of the drawings and etchings of natural collections which were popular centuries ago.

KirbyIris

Even the horizontal crop of his photographs imparts the feeling of an old collection box. It’s almost as if the viewer is inside the box, looking through the images towards the light behind it.

Kirby uses his skill with a camera to bring out the ethereal beauty in his subjects, like the translucence of the leaves and flowers above, giving them an almost magical glow.

It’s astonishing, but he didn’t use any digital manipulation to create that final image.

KirbyLeaf

It makes sense though—each of these close-up views of nature is meant to bring about a more intimate relationship with the world around us, so to create something digitally just wouldn’t be the same.

Experiencing life at a macro-perspective is typical, but adjusting our viewpoint to a micro-scale allows us to take in the simple beauty and magic surrounding us. Kirby’s goal is simply to remind people to slow down and look for the unnoticed.

I invite you all to explore more photographs from Kirby’s catalog of “natural specimens” at his website, KirbyJonesPhotography.com.

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