Joachim Bøgedal

The series “Emissaries” is composed of 16 individual works. The images are contact printed in the darkroom as silver gelatine prints with an individual work title presented in capital letters underneath. Each piece covers a different coded message and consists of an unique arrangement made out of one to various photographs picturing flowers.

Flowers have the power of attraction: Its scent allures, its beauty attracts. Flowers are given to loved ones in times of crisis, romance or to conway affection. They construct meaning through their own language called floriography which has been used over hundred of years as means of communication. In the early 1800 hundreds the first book of floriography was published in France by Joseph Hammer-Purgstall, only to discover that different cultures had different meanings tied to each flower, showing that meaning is being constructed and developed through cultural knowledge. The meaning of the flower often comes from the characteristics, behaviour, shape and/or color it has. After the publication of Hammer-Purgstall, the meanings started to unite and messages could now travel over borders within the western world.

The interest in floriography blossomed in the Victorian Era (1819-1901): Gifts of blooms, plants, and specific floral arrangements were used to send encrypted messages to the recipient, allowing the sender to express feelings which could not be spoken aloud in the Victorian society. Armed with floral dictionaries, Victorians often exchanged small talking bouquets that served as an emotional proxy in the time where feelings and emotions were culturally suppressed: Forbidden love, hatred, ambivalence. A hidden message. In this context flowers took on a further political significance

because they contradicted the conventions of the society at that time. The flower and its aesthetics explicitly raise questions about the way meaning is being constructed through an alternative method of communication. In search of a language that overcomes borders I found the long lost language of flowers, an underestimated but still political language in the modern world.

In my pieces, each flower arrangement is subject to an inner logic, it visualizes the flowers meaning as an  associative figure. The smallest unit in each piece is the photograph of a flower shown in a typical frame of a 4×5 inch negative. One might think that the flowers are part of an old collected archive where in reality all images were found through google searches, screen grabbed and photoshopped into the negative frame. These images and their formation turn into symbolic signs with extended value. The fake archive offers the possibility to understand the old pattern in order to understand the new and decode the given message.

Montage: If you can understand the pattern you can predict the future, until the pattern changes. In this case you can go back and study the pattern in order to then predict the future.

The privilege of the archive → key of the future.

Joachim Bøgedal is a Danish/Swedish Artist born in 1993, Denmark. He holds a BFA in Fine Art Photography from Akademin Valand, Gothenburg, Sweden, and is currently completing his diploma at Vienna Fine Arts Academy, where he studies Art and Photography with Prof. Martin Guttmann. Joachim’s artistic focus lies mainly in photography and its boundaries, analogue processes, manipulation and the storytelling properties of photography.