• Flowers are beautiful. People are beautiful. So what happens when you combine the two?

• Parker Fitzgerald’s photography is beautiful.  Floral designer Riley Messina’s work is beautiful. So what happens when you combine the two?

These questions sound like the beginning of a joke, but they’re not. They are, however, answered by Parker Fitzgerald and Riley Messina’s latest artistic collaboration Overgrowth. The photographs combine anonymous portraiture with floral styling in a unique way that encourages us to question our understanding of what is natural, what beauty is and what makes a person beautiful.

The style of the photographs in Overgrowth is somewhat reminiscent of pre-Raphaelite paintings like Ophelia, which is of no surprise when you consider the pre-Raphaelite doctrines, which included the attentive study of nature, the portrayal of the heartfelt, the exclusion of what is conventional, and most importantly of all, “to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.” When you consider each of these elements in turn, you see that Overgrowth in many ways lives by these tenets – it avoids convention and includes intricate plant detailing to produce “thoroughly good pictures.”

If you’d like a copy of one of the photographs of your own, you can purchase Overgrowth posters online.

image source: http://www.erbastudio.com/