Flower is my middle name

My name is Lisa Flower Shin. My immigrant father didn’t give me a Korean name like my brother. No—I was born in America and therefore, I would have an American name. It’s not as if he had a list of US names in his pocket.

I had attempted to photograph flowers many times before in my career, but always felt I failed at it. It was so much harder than I imagined. Too often, the images resembled stock photography—never my aim—and I felt the pressure to create something remarkable.

My image of hellebores from 2016, which appears in Noho Production’s A Celebration of Still Life, was one of the few I could truly accept. Many years later, in 2024, I was generously invited by a friend to cut whatever I wanted from her garden (she was also the photo editor who gave me my first internship, but more on that later). I couldn’t refuse. That summer, I spent every spare moment photographing dahlias, roses, and peonies. Those images can be seen here.

So when my long time client, Morgenthal Frederics, needed window images for NYBG in Bloom on Madison Avenue, I was primed and ready for the challenge. It was a fresh subject—pairing eyewear with flowers for the first time—and on that job I realized that though flowers can be vibrant and bold, they are sometimes just as beautiful when they’re quiet, subdued, and inconspicuous.