My bookshelves are like the proverbial loaves and fishes, in that no matter how many times I go through them and cull out everything I don’t HAVE to own, they produce boxes and boxes that need to be sold or donated to make room for the new ones I am continually acquiring.

I sold this last batch of 8 boxes in only 3 stops (well, four, but one didn’t buy ANYTHING). And I got away with only buying 2 new (used) ones in exchange. One of these was Flower Portraits: the Life Cycle of Beauty, by the photographer Joyce Tenneson.

Tenneson had just finished a book of photographs on women in the third phase of their lives, and had become fascinated by the unexpected beauty she saw in these older women. Flowers had long been a photographic muse for her and in this, her next book, she started photographing them throughout their life cycle too. What she found amazed her; in her own words “I saw wisdom and beauty with new eyes”.

As a budding photographer (and aging woman) I love these expansive images, unfolding expressions of an innate beauty that transforms but does not fade.