The Fine Art Photography of Lorita Winfield
Unfamiliar Beauty
The closer you look, the less familiar a flower becomes — and the more beautiful.
The closer you look, the less familiar a flower becomes — and the more beautiful.
Seen from inches away, a petal stops being a petal. It becomes light, silk, landscape — something unfamiliar, and entirely beautiful.
Intimate studies made at the threshold where a bloom dissolves into pure color and curve. Each photograph holds still long enough for the flower to become strange again.
Roses in every register, from peppermint stripe to porcelain, with hydrangeas drifting from indigo to silver. Named for the Shemer Art Center exhibition where Lorita's work first hung in a juried show.
The drama of the Arizona desert at close range. Cactus flowers that live a single day, gold pollen suspended mid-fall, and the sculpted armor of agave.
A meditation in white — petals folding over petals, gold stamens scattered like sparks. Fifteen works, each 14 × 14.
Blooms emerging from darkness, and the quiet boundary lines of living things. This series includes the named works Blush, Quiet Waiting, Sun Dial, Touch, and Triple Crown.
Lorita's passion for photography blossomed in the late 1960s, during a twelve-year stay in Italy, with nothing more than a Kodak Instamatic in hand. Today she creates with several cameras, everything from an iPhone to a Hasselblad.
On returning to the United States, she continued her constant search for organic, aesthetically pleasing compositions in nature. She attached her photographs to blank cards and sent them to friends as gifts and greetings for holidays and special occasions. Her friends responded with compliments and made collections of her photographic cards, the kind of encouragement an artist can use as further inspiration.
Over the years, friends in the US, Italy, and Germany would remark that they had saved the cards in a box because the photography was, in their words, too beautiful to throw away.
In Arizona, Lorita began in earnest to capture an intimate view, an Unfamiliar Beauty, of the drama of the desert, and to have her photographic floral art presented on paper, canvas, and metal. She sold her first pieces in 2019 for office and home decor, and her work was selected for the Shemer Art Center's juried exhibition Garden Musings in 2020.
For print inquiries, exhibitions, or simply to talk about beauty — reach out anytime.