Harald Altmaier’s photographs of floral tableaux, as colossal in effort as in scale, recall 17th-century Dutch still lifes, but the inspiration behind them is far wider, as Carla Passino finds.
A piglet, soft pink with dark-brown stripes, sits on a vitrine shelf next to an aged urn, a candle and three frosted-glass vases. He’s a model in search of a canvas, on which he will appear when inspiration strikes the artist, photographer Harald Altmaier. ‘I saw him in Paris and had to have him. He’s been here since May and will go in a woodland shot, I think, with ferns, mushrooms — and there will be a little mole coming out of the soil.’
Mr Altmaier’s pictures are closer to paintings than classic photographs, portraying monumental floral arrangements against gilded mirrors, sleeping cherubs and swathes of damasks, silks and rich velvets that cascade in sinuous drapes, as butterflies, caterpillars or stag beetles frolic among the petals. Reminiscent of 17th-century Dutch still lifes, the images often have a deeper meaning and hidden messages, with memento mori sprinkled across the foliage — a skull here, a spent candle there and some canvases calling for a game of ‘spot the crow’. (A clue for the wintry Composition V: peer closely between the Savoy cabbage and the old man’s beard).
What’s perhaps even more astounding is the fact that every single flower is not only real, but has been artfully arranged by Mr Altmaier himself, a florist by trade. Long passionate about photography, he invested in good cameras about 10 years ago to take pictures of his bouquets, creating backdrops to give ‘an idea of scale, how big these flowers actually are’. Next, he started building entire scenes, which, over time, evolved into floral tableaux. ‘I have always absolutely adored still-life paintings of the Dutch kind from the 16th and 17th centuries, so it was natural to do this.’
Winter is coming and vegetables replace flowers in Composition V—never one to allow waste, Mr Altmaier gave the entire display to neighbours to cook with. Can you spot the crows? ©Harald Altmaier
Mr Altmaier cherishes having full creative control over every little aspect of his compositions, whether lighting (he uses natural light with very long exposures), schedule (‘I can work as late as I want’) or money: ‘I don’t have a budget, do you know how wonderful that is?’
Finding flowers is more of a challenge than one might think. It’s not only a matter of securing the right varieties: most commercial blooms, he reveals, are grown very straight so they can be transported easily and stand proud in a vase, whereas, for his arrangements, he wants some to droop and others to ramble. He has been known to raid friends’ gardens (with permission), knock on people’s doors and say: ‘Here’s an orchid. Can I pick some of your lilac?’ He has even grown his own.
A bug is brave (or daft) enough to climb on a grey crowned crane in this huge tableau, for which Harold Altmaier raided a friend’s rose garden. ©Harald Altmaier
The gnarly lemons he uses in some arrangements come from Italy, the dried insects from Paris, the birds from a London taxidermist that supplies film props or, sometimes, from eccentric fashion designer Basia Zarzycka, who has lent him, among others, three flying pheasant to add playfulness to a maroon triumph of camellias, tulips and hellebores. As for the carefully chosen antiques in the background, Mr Altmaier has Joe Chaffer of Vagabond Antiques on speed dial, whether for a 17th-century Italian tapestry or a pedestal urn in Breccia Medicea marble, the veining of which echoes the blue and purple of lilacs, foxgloves and campanulas of Composition XV.
Much thought goes into staging each tableau, because the pictures are barely retouched in post-production — except perhaps for removing the insects’ pins — and Mr Altmaier freely admits that, when he is prepping for a shot, his studio looks ‘like a bombsite’. Strewn on the floor are thousands of flowers, four or five times the number he will use, so that he can choose them at different stages of maturity. ‘Certain roses I want almost completely over, so they tell a story.’
Summer blooms crowd Composition XVI, obscuring Poseidon, whose presence is only suggested by Amphitrite gazing down from the top left corner. ©Harald Altmaier
As he begins photographing, he examines the arrangement through a laptop or an iPad: ‘Every time you shoot, you blow it up and look at all the details — and you see there’s a broken flower, that butterfly collapsed, this rose moved.’ Once in a while, he makes adjustments — ‘but it’s not that easy, because every time you add a flower, something else moves. If [it’s] 30 shots until you actually get the final one, that whole arrangement is constantly moving, dancing in front of you’.
Leaves and blooms almost seem to have a mind of their own, so, despite his thorough preparation, not everything goes according to plan: ‘A painter can paint that one rose leaf and it goes exactly where he wants it to be. I don’t have that choice. Flowers can drive you — well, not quite insane, but…’ The weather is a potential nightmare, too. ‘This was nerve-wracking,’ he says, pointing at a tableau of pristine white flowers. Very pale arrangements are challenging because every time you touch a petal you leave a mark, but this one was taken in an ancient barn in Petworth, West Sussex, on a very hot summer day, when the thermometer hit 37˚C: ‘Love in a mist, Queen Anne’s lace — they wilt in a minute. I replaced the sweetpeas four times.’ However, he says, ‘the advantage of being my age and having done 45 years of flower-arranging is that I’m chilled’ — and, indeed, the photograph is a soothing sea of white tranquillity, with not even the slightest hint of the effort it required.
There are no hidden messages in this tableau, simply a joyous celebration of the darling buds of May. ©Harald Altmaier
The same care goes into choosing the right frames. They, too, hark back to the 17th century — notably, Dutch master Balthasar van der Ast. Based on the frame of an Ast flower painting at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, they’re made by John Davies Framing in almost the same way as they would have been then. Each is bespoke, with up to 15 coats of polish and colours chosen to highlight the tones of the composition; so a frame with a touch of brown will encase the rich blaze of an autumnal grouping, a matte-black one will sheathe blooms in cooler hues.
None of Mr Altmaier’s pictures, however, is ever a copy or even directly influenced by a Dutch master’s painting — not only because those artists collated flowers from different seasons in their artwork. ‘My inspiration comes from many different places,’ he admits, mentioning antique portraits, screens and musical stands among others, before proudly presenting his latest muse, a taxidermied lizard: ‘He will be in a shot where he runs along a console and steals an egg out of a nest.’
Perhaps one of Mr Altmaier’s most serene compositions—yet one of the most challenging to photograph, as white flowers bruise easily. ©Harald Altmaier
Even so, those pesky blooms Mr Altmaier loves will sometimes throw a curveball and take him in an unexpected direction: ‘If the flowers have a different appearance, if there’s something more beautiful, you steer that way. It’s all in the moment. You have an idea, but, on the day, you let go and play with it.’
Visit www.haraldaltmaierphotography.com; @haraldaltmaierphotography
Ptolemy Dean: The magic that happens when you stop to draw a place, instead of just taking a photograph
A new book examines the streetscapes of our historic towns and marvels at what we can easily take for granted.
‘If you get 12 great photographs a year, you’re doing well’: Charlie Waite on the secrets of landscape photography
The world-renowned landscape photographer Charlie Waite joins the Country Life Podcast.
Clive Nichols: Secrets from the king of garden photography
Britain's top garden photographer Clive Nichols joins the Country Life podcast.
