Even if you keep flowers in your home, even if you grow them and cut them all summer long, odds are against your taking note of the kind of detail you’ll see in Ron Kretsch’s Flora, a collection of photos on view at Bryon Miller Photography Studio and Gallery in Collinwood. In a statement, Kretsch says in the work he “seek[s] to preserve and examine the fragility that often goes unnoticed in our everyday encounters with nature. [ … ] I hope to preserve for deeper scrutiny things which can often only exist for a week, or even a single afternoon, offering ongoing opportunities to meditate on the ephemeral.”  Flora is on view Saturday, September 14 during the annual Waterloo Arts Fest, and for the coming weeks, through October 10, including for Walk All Over Waterloo October 4. It’s presented with support from Derek Hess Gallery.

Cleveland art is a relatively small world, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that I worked with Ron Kretsch while he was art director at the Cleveland Free Times, and also at Cleveland Scene. But in Cleveland’s art and music world, just about everyone has probably crossed paths with Kretsch. He was one of the original Coventry kids in the 80s, got his photography degree at the Cleveland Institute of Art, and has been a constant presence on the noise/metal/experimental music scene, contributing aggressive, agitated and noisy guitar to Murderedman, the seventeen-guitar orchestra known as YOID, Banging Fragiles, Biblical Proof of UFOs, Proletarian Art Threat and others.  And he’s also designed a bunch of books, including Forced Perspective – The Story of Derek Hess (2016), Dead Boys 1977: The Lost Photographs Of Dave Treat (2017), Derek Hess – 31 Days In May (2018), among others. He can be one of the most sharp-witted, sardonic people I know.

It’s an amalgam of those biographical details that causes me to be surprised that this is Kretsch’s first solo show, and that it is a straight up celebration of flowers in all their astonishing beauty and detail. These are earnest appreciation of what a believer might call miraculous, but I’d just call observation and again celebration of the intricate detail that can be found all around us in the natural world, if only we look close enough. To help you look close, they’re enlarged to many times the flowers’ actual size, in some cases as large as 3 X 3-foot prints. The pistils, stamens and petals give Georgia O’Keeffe a run for her sexy money. Despite the level of detail, they’re not warts-and-all documentation: any intrusions, like insects, for example, have been edited out.

In speaking with another former colleague about these photos—a few of which have appeared in the occasional group show in the last year—they observed that the black backgrounds could be seen as a connection to the musical aesthetic of Metal. But that doesn’t ring true to me. These backgrounds aren’t the kind of complicated black that speaks of angst or discontent. This is pure black that plays its part by highlighting detail—a background of nothing.

To create that, Kretsch set up a soft light box overhead on a table, with reflectors on the sides and black velvet underneath and behind to photograph the flowers. Each image is named for the flower that is its subject. They are not straight up portraiture: As if to encourage contemplation, many of the images begin with single flowers and are made into mandalas by mirroring and repeating them around a radius. The colors are exceedingly rich, and the focus absolutely sharp.

Even in the photos of single flowers, some of the images have been manipulated to highlight the delicacy  or further marvel at it. A photo of an orchid, for example, uses photoshop to create layers of  translucence.  You could stare at them for a long time.

There’s a gorgeous catalog, printed by Kyle Osborne at Outlandish Press. The first printing of Flora consists of 50 signed and numbered copies, available for $40 each. Buy the book, and you can stare longer.

Flora: Photos by Ron Kretsch

September 14 – October 10

Bryon Miller Photography Studio and Gallery

15335 Waterloo Road

Cleveland, Ohio 44110

BryonMiller.Photography