ALISHAART

Beauty in Death

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This project focuses on ‘Beauty in Decay’. I have started to become interested in this

topic after writing my dissertation about Alexander McQueen and the Romanticism

and Dark Romanticism Era. While writing my thesis, I came across his ‘Sarabande

Dress’ which is entirely made of real flowers. McQueen states, that he loves things

that rot and takes inspiration from death. McQueen also states: ‘People find my things

sometimes aggressive. But I don’t see it as aggressive. I see it as romantic, dealing

with a dark side of personality.’ After looking at McQueen’s dresses, I have seen lots

of connections to the Dark Romantic Naturalism Era and decided to research ‘Beauty

in Death’ further. I realized, that I never created a photo album in this course so far

and that it would be very interesting for me to focus on photography, in order to look

into a new topic. I started to research dark photography such as the famous ‘A

beautiful suicide’ picture. I also came across the photographer Billy Kidd, who is

famous for his decaying flower photographs. His images have inspired me to create

my own decaying flower images. The ‘Sarabande dress’ and Billy Kidd’s

photography have been a great inspiration for my decaying flower photography

project. In order to give this Flower Decay Photo Album more depth, I collected all the

flowers from the Charlton Cemetery, in order to not only signify the death of flowers,

however, to also connect it to death and decay in general.

My Flower Decay Photography