Poppe works with photo assignments, documentary photography and photo art. Her art photographs are often complex and have a clear aesthetic and with an exquisite color awareness. Her strong coloring is a central tool in most works. The artistic craft also has an ever-increasing focus. A wealth of photographic detail and a clarity in aesthetic color compositions describe the images, they are all artistic close-up studies with photography as a medium.
Tine Poppe’s experimentation is somewhat different from the methods of other contemporary photographers and the series Gilded lilies is to the highest degree traditional portrait photography, but in a unique way. In her studio, she arranges flowers as a still life in front of an already printed landscape photograph. Many will probably think that she develops the motifs digitally in photoshop, but that is not the case. The method refers to the classic portrait photographers’ photo sessions, where they arranged the portraits in front of the canvas with light clouds or gentle mountain landscapes.
Compared to previous photo series signed by Poppe, for example the titles Mother Nature and Botanical, her environmental commitment in Gilded lilieseven more clearly articulated. Here we are presented with a series of portraits of flowers placed in more constructed and indefinable landscapes. The flowers are set against backgrounds of landscape photos she has taken on travels in areas affected by the climate crisis. While the portrayed flower has been bought from local florists here at home. Poppe portrays flowers produced in an industrial greenhouse, both distant from their original habitat and far from nature itself. In addition, the flowers are transported miles from their artificial growing environment and to a point of sale, available to us as any salable product. Even “nature” has become a pawn in the capitalist system and the consumer’s circuit and merry-go-round. The flower portraits appear as dystopian interpretations of a modern still life and are well suited to today’s violent climate changes.
Poppe’s art project has a thought-provoking message. The photographs emphasize how extremely short-lived “beauty” can be experienced and defined by today’s ideal of beauty. Our time’s aesthetic ideals to combat the transitory and visible signs of aging are an almost grotesque battle against nature and the cycle of the environment. The struggle to fight and hide the impermanent destroys not only nature itself, but also relationships between us humans. Poppe’s project perhaps first draws attention to the industrial aspects of today’s floriculture and the artificial processes used to achieve perfection. But then Poppe goes even further to highlight our role in the destruction of plants and landscapes, and not just our own transience and death.
Gilded lilies have a strong message with an effective visual and aesthetic appeal. Flowers represent a timeless beauty, a unique aesthetic and fragility. Everything has its origin in an environment we are about to lose due to the man-made climate changes we are now experiencing.
