Death in Colors

Analog photography, shot on film by the light of a handheld torch, without any flash lighting. Hand-developed in the darkroom, printed on cotton paper, presented without glass.

Black Flower Secret Garden is Yuri Catania's tribute to his wife, who patiently tends their private garden in southern Switzerland, among the Merlot vineyards overlooking Lake Lugano. Hers is an act of love that spans the entire cycle of life, from seed and bulb to final withering; his is its contemplation. At night, while the flowers and the world around them sleep, Catania walks the garden alone with an analog camera and a simple handheld torch, the kind you would take down to the cellar: no flash, no staging, no preparation. Only the quiet, the beam of light, and whatever the darkness chooses to reveal.

In this image the cycle reaches its final act. The flowers portrayed are dried and spent, gathered in a last bouquet where a single dahlia still blazes among the fading corollas. Suspended against the velvet black of the night, decay itself becomes sumptuous: the colours grow deep and jewel-like, and what daylight would call death, the flashlight reveals as another form of beauty. It is a contemporary vanitas born not from the studio but from a real garden and a real love.

Photography, for Catania, is the final act of a long path, not its purpose. Each work is made entirely by hand, from the development of the film in the darkroom to the print on cotton paper, whose texture lends the subject an almost three-dimensional presence. No glass separates the viewer from the image: nothing must stand between the eye and the flower.

Have you ever observed flowers in the darkness? Try it, just a flashlight. Welcome to our secret garden.