Joy Gregory: Chickweed, 2017

Joy Gregory’s work combines considerations of history, race and feminine beauty with a through-line of imagery representing flowers and plants. Her first major body of photographs was The Language of Flowers—a series of cyanotypes exploring the Victorian symbolism of flowers, inspired by memories of her childhood and the imagery of 19th century photographer Anna Atkins. She has used the cyanotype process ever since, for which she places objects on a coated paper that, once briefly exposed to a light source and then fixed, leaves a photogram ‘shadow’ of the object in iridescent blue. She has used the process throughout her artistic life, for instance, for Girl Thing, a series of cyanotypes of traditional objects of feminine beauty, and a similar salt print process for The Handbag Project, photograms of delicate vintage handbags once owned by white women in South Africa during the Apartheid era.

Chickweed is a series of cyanotype photograms made in 2017, in an edition of 30. Each print is unique, made from a different sprig of chickweed.

This is the second in a series of Autograph editioned prints, presented by Aperture, in support of Autograph and its 35 years of work in photography on the themes of race, rights and representation.

Each limited-edition print is hand-packed with great care and ships from New York within 3–5 days.