At first the delicate life rests in the dark, tightly rolled up and folded in a sturdy shell. Protected from cold, dryness and predators. Until the day when the sun is high enough, the bud ripens and bursts and its colorful contents are released into the air. A bit like a butterfly peeling out of its cocoon.
The photographer
Former physics teacher Michael Wohl-Iffland has been traveling with a camera for decades. When he came to a new school, he almost always first set up a darkroom
© Michael Wohl-Iffland
The creator of the fragile cuts on these pages is neither a gardener nor a botanist, but rather a technology enthusiast as a former physics teacher. Michael Wohl-Iffland takes a correspondingly scientific look at buds and flowers. “I’m fascinated by the many structures that are in a bud that you wouldn’t even suspect from the outside. And the compactness, the tightly compressed nature,” he explains. “Even when you send satellites into space, they are folded tightly together. Like a poppy flower before it explodes in the summer.”
The idea of bringing such hidden wonders to light, layer by layer, came to him four years ago in the Botanical Garden Singapore. “There I got the blossom of a palm tree in my hand. I started to open it, plucked away a petal and was so fascinated that I started a new project.”
Since then, Wohl-Iffland has picked hundreds of flowers and carried them to his house in Hamburg’s Harburg district, laying them on just a few sheets of damp toilet paper. His photo studio measures just about 50 by 50 centimeters on his desk in the darkened study. Here he cuts open the finds with a razor blade, drapes them in front of black, light-absorbing molleton fabric and illuminates them with LED lamps.
Flowers are among the most successful inventions of evolution
This is how a photo safari into the interior of the flower begins: His camera, a digital Lumix, takes a series of images, each time shifting the focus and sharpness by fractions of a millimeter. The camera then automatically stacks the individual photo files and combines them into an overall image in which the object appears razor-sharp and three-dimensional. A lot of effort for someone who does photography as a passion and not as a career. And yet little compared to the immense efforts that plants have made for millions of years to maintain and spread their species.
Because the object flower only serves one purpose: reproduction. Through pollination, the genetic information from the pollen grain and the ovule mix, creating a new embryo and then a seed. Flowers are among the most successful inventions of evolution. The delicate structures probably existed before the dinosaurs – and survived them with ease.
When researchers at the University of Zurich examined Swiss rock cores a few years ago, they found fossilized pollen in them. It was dated to be more than 240 million years old, making it a full 100 million years older than the oldest flower remains found to date. What the original flowers may have looked like cannot be reconstructed from the petrified dust. They may have been pollinated by beetles. There were no bees back then.
His photography story began with a historical accident
Today, around 300,000 species of flowering plants are known, and each species has its own pollination strategy: from the simple and inconspicuous spikelets of grasses, whose pollen is spread by the wind, to colorful, bizarre structures whose purpose is to attract large or small animals. That’s why many flowering plants offer nectar deep down in the calyx in addition to brightly colored petals and an intoxicating scent. As a reward for insects and other animals that make the effort to crawl into the flowers and thus become a courier for the sticky pollen. Bat-pollinated flowers produce the largest amounts of nectar in the tropics because their visitors are larger and hungrier than bees or butterflies.
Other plants shamelessly deceive their pollinators: the sail-like flower of the arum simulates the smell of rot and urine. In the evening, she lures flies into a bag-like trap at the bottom of the flowers, from which the prisoners are only released the next morning when they are completely powdered with pollen. Orchids of the Ragwurz genus attract insects with empty promises of sex: the dark and sometimes pretty striped flowers mimic the silhouette and smell of female bees and grave wasps willing to mate and are enthusiastically approached by males.
Despite all his enthusiasm for flowers, Michael Wohl-Iffland does not see himself as a pure nature photographer. In his pictures you can also see former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, the Hamburg harbor edge or a piece of contemporary history. His own photography story began with a historic misfortune: in 1964, he used his confirmation money to buy his first camera, an Agfa with two apertures. He wanted to try it out at the US Air Force’s open day in his hometown of Bremerhaven. But a Starfighter crashed during a flight demonstration. The first photographer on site was 14-year-old Michael.