"...a form—in verse or prose—for catching both the rapidity of the mind and the phantasmal solidity of the world." —Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form
Notes
The photographs here—made in April 2026 with the simple purpose of being equal in mind, even briefly, to the presence of blossoms in wind and sun—emerged through a photographic experiment that bears elaborating, which draws together analogue and digital ways in photography.
For the photographs at the beginning and the coda of this work, I used a Leica SL2-S digital camera, fitted with lenses I bought in the 1990s—a 50mm Summicron R f/2, a 135mm Elmarit f/2.8, and a Zeiss Sonnar 250mm f/5.6 for Hasselblad. Sometimes I added a 35mm extension tube, to shorten the minimum focusing distance, but I made these photographs with the lens stopped down for deep depth of field. These photographs hold the blossoms at a formal, respectful distance.
For the bulk of the photographs, I attached a Sigma fp digital camera to my Canham 4x5 view camera, fitted with a 12" (305mm) Goerz Dagor f/6.8 from the early 1950s. I applied significant movements to the front standard, and used the lens wide open for shallow depth of field. Sometimes I made single frames, but more often groups, that I then stitched together in Photoshop or PTGui panoramic software. The resulting aspect ratios and frame sizes vary greatly, but often these photographs will print 40" or more on the long side, with the imaged flowers equal in size to the actual flowers, or larger. Here is a comparative view of one of these photographs as shown on this website, together with 25%, 50%, and 100% crops to indicate what the images actually contain. This photograph will print natively at 38.5"x28" at 300 dpi.
Jason Francisco / Azalea blossom, 25% crop.
Jason Francisco / Azalea blossom 50% crop
Jason Francisco / Azalea blossom 100% crop
These photographs were difficult to make: a slight breeze looks under the dark cloth like a gale, throwing everything into wild unseeability, requiring of me new forms of anticipation to make photographs. But this difficulty is close to what interested me—photographs that somehow entered into midst of the blossoms with a gestural kind of stillness that did not entrap them, photographs with air in them, and a sense of how visual and mental space moves. This is what the camera has to become to make photographs like of this kind:
Accompanying these photographs are poems I have been working on for the last year and a half or so, one example of which is above. In my notebook, I write a poem with blank lines between the lines, and then I write a second poem into those blank lines, and fold the two poems together graphically on the page. I like the way that the two contributing poems can be read separately or together, and I like the way they make meaning interleave, a little like petals.
This work, like all of the pages on this website, is best viewed on a monitor. Clicking any of the images enlarges them, and allows them to be seen as a slideshow.
Atlanta, May 2026