Floating Bouquet

Floating Bouquet exploits how the brain is hard-wired to experience photography’s flat representations of three-dimensional objects as still being three-dimensional. To make this image, I printed a photograph of a bouquet of tulips, mounted it on foam core, and cut out the background. I elevated it slightly over a seamless backdrop, then hung a strawberry from some filament. By lighting the image from above, the rephotographed bouquet has what almost appears to be a drop-shadow photoshop effect, but is in fact just its actual shadow. The strawberry’s shadow and placement create a relationship with the lowest tulip, and the subtle shine of its filament serves as a clue to how this deliberately confusing image was built.