Orchids and Butterflies

“If Time and Space, as the Sages say,
are things which can never be,
the sun that does not give in to change
is no way superior to us.
So why, Love, should we ever pray
to live a whole century?
The butterfly that lives only one day
has already lived for eternity.”

(T.S. Eliot)

I mainly photograph people. I love human contact, the looks. The more people I photograph, the more I know myself. It has been like this since the beginning, for all these years.

But, since two years ago, when I lived in Malaysia, I have started to diversify what I photographed. After all, we grow and change, even the stone changes shape in the erosion by seawater. Just as our readings change, thanks also to the new photographers we know, new poets and music. It took me ten years to be able to appreciate Franco Fontana's photographs. So, in Malaysia, I started to photograph many landscapes, the skies, the walls, and the trees.

However, I really enjoyed photographing two things: orchids and butterflies. Except it’s not live butterflies, but those embalmed in the Entomology Laboratory of the School of Biology of the University USM, Penang, where I worked for two years.

Each of us draws, in our own way, the lines that connect two random points; a single line that joints two of many points. I don't know why, instinctively, it was natural for me to associate these photographs. As always, I first follow my instincts without thinking, only later I think about it. I try to understand, and writing helps me in this. I use it as a form of excavation.

I've always liked flowers. You learn a lot by looking at them. In flowers, there is the constant search for light, with each petal, thirsty for light, or locked up in themselves, in their solitude. I love orchids from Araki's photographs. Of course, roses are a classic. But orchids are so sensually metaphorical, with multiple shapes.

Every flower is a poem, and whoever that stupidly thinks flowers are only for the feminine and delicate souls, he's very wrong. Orchids are here to remind us of it. In their form, there is every human aspect: strength, aggressiveness, eroticism, voracity, timidity, delicacy, lust and sanctity, motherhood and solitude.

In August last year, in Penang, there was a fair of the most beautiful orchids in the world. I went there alone, spending an entire afternoon.

In the Entomology Laboratory, however, there were glass cases and cases of insects and many butterflies. I was there to work on the photographic book for the University, but I was fascinated by it and came back twice. It seemed to take me to enter another dimension.

Thanks also to my Thai friend, Fitree, a student who took care of that laboratory and so passionate about her work. I was amazed to see how she carefully took the insects, observed them with a lens, prepared them for me to be photographed. Those butterflies are pierced by pins, but how they seem alive. Motionless.

Talking to my biologist friend, I told her that our job is actually very similar. We both pierce with a pin, in an instant, what we consider beautiful, to preserve it from its disappearance. After all, a photograph is not so different from those preserved butterflies: it's an image that for us represents our idea of beauty in nature. 

A photographer has pierced—through the lens and in the printed paper—something that was previously alive and in order to be able to look at it forever. Just like the biologist has embalmed the butterflies. It moved in the crystallized moment of its “death to life”.  As Araki said in an interview: “Taking a picture is killing the subject.”

The orchid, on the other hand, represents the aggressive explosion of nature's beauty and creativity. It's domineering and showy, which catches the eyes like insects, with its mouth open, almost vulgar; remind you of the origin of the world, as the title of the famous painting by Gustave Courbet.

I believe that this is the line of connection between these two passions: because in the end, they all coexist within me, somehow there must be a relationship between them. And now I begin to understand.

The orchid is a mystery to be explored, alive, fascinating; the embalmed butterfly is an eternal present of past beauty. The orchid is the eros of Greek mythology, the fourth god created to compensate the chaos, born first, divine and at the same time the philosophical principle that pushes towards beauty. It is life, with its lips apart.

Those pierced butterflies in the glass chest are instead the melancholy reflection of that beauty, they are the end. The abandonment of the flow of existence.

They stand there, motionless, like photographs of loved ones who are no longer here. Looking at them is a pain, because they also, as Borges magnificently wrote in the last verses of his poem about things:

“They will last beyond our oblivion; they will never know that we are gone.” 

 (“Duraran mas alla de nuestro olvido; no sabran nunca que nos hemos ido.”)

(All photos are taken in Penang, Malaysia, in 2018 and 2019)

T.S. Eliot, Opere (1904–1939), Bompiani, 2003.

Jorge Luis Borges, Poesie (1923–1976), BUR, 1987.

Italian version