Every good photography book causes a viewer to pause.

We may linger over an image because it is disturbing, because it is provocative, because it is illuminating. We may linger over an image because it somehow resonates with our own history, our own cultural or physical environment, and we may linger over an image because it doesn’t resonate at all – it is part of the Other, completely foreign, therefore mysterious and alluring.

Sometimes, though, we also linger over a photo book because it is simply so beautiful that it catches our breath.

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“Flowers of Provence” by Jamie Beck
Published by Simon Element, 2023
review by W. Scott Olsen

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I am one of those people who linger for hours over field guides. It does not matter whether the book in my hand is the Audubon Field Guide to Birds of North America, Trees, Wildflowers, or a Peterson guide to Caterpillars, Fishes, Butterflies and Moths or Clouds and Weather. I’ve spent hours going through images of birds I will never hear and plants I will never touch, wondering about their content and context, imagining myself present, reading the notes, and expanding my knowledge of what exists on this planet.

The images in field guides are brilliant in the way they offer examples, and I find myself projecting myself into whatever world they inhabit. But there is a limit here, too. Field guides are not fine art. While they may be nicely composed and sharp and deeply informative, they tell us how something appears but not what that something is like.

To move from documentation to fine art, however, the step is often a step closer to beauty, broadly defined. There might be less data, but now we have soul.

I have in my lap this afternoon The Flowers of Provence, by Jamie Beck. And this is an intensely beautiful book.

The first thing I thought when I opened this book was, “I’m going to leave this out.” I didn’t mean I was going to ignore it. I mean, I’m going to take it home. I’m going to put it on a table, on top of a stack of other books, and I’m going to make it conspicuous. I’m going to leave it out for others to see. You open this book, even casually, without much forethought, and your first reaction is, “Oh my.” The beauty is arresting. This book will pause your day.

Provence is the landscape of Van Gogh. Provence is the landscape of Cezanne and Picasso, Matisse and Puget. There is a type of visual beauty here that is felt as much as seen, and to capture that feeling requires equal parts of talent and insight and, according to Beck, magic.

Jamie Beck, raised in Texas, a photographer who ran a successful commercial studio in New York, recently had a best seller called An American in Provence, which chronicled how what was planned as a one-year visit to Provence changed the course of her life, and she decided to stay. The Flowers of Provence can be seen as a follow-up book to the first one but stands on its own very well. You do not have any information or experience with the first book to enjoy this one deeply.

According to the book’s press material, Jamie Beck took her first photograph at the age of thirteen and soon after began earning her living as a professional photographer. By twenty-eight, she opened her own commercial photographic studio in lower Manhattan and has shot campaigns for Chanel, Donna Karan, Nike, Oscar de la Renta, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, and many others.

The Flowers of Provence is painterly in technique, as well as how it addresses the idea of what an image should do in the heart and mind of a viewer. It is a soft and elegant collection. This is a book which seeks to express, in a photograph, not only the likeness of flowers, but that kind of ethereal, difficult to pin down feeling we get from looking at them in the field as well as at home.

She writes in her introduction, “Often I find myself thinking about what it is that makes flowers so universally appealing. Beauty, diversity, and symbolism aside, I believe there’s a morsel of magic at play. Every day, I strive to conjure that magic in my studio. There is a quietness to this craft and an intimacy that comes from working with something so fragile and fleeting.”

The introduction is also filled with stories about how she came to see and celebrate the flowers of Provence. For example, one narrative involves roses. “For many months, I’d heard about the very esteemed, very aloof rose grower, Benoit Hochart, whose roses grace the entryway of five-star hotels, cultural centers in Provence, and even royal weddings. It took me years to find him, and even then, he refused to meet me until a mutual friend gifted me a bouquet of his roses, which I passionately photographed for a week. When they shared my work with him, he finally agreed to meet me in person. As we walked through his rose garden, it looked as if a rainbow had dropped from the sky and onto the bushes before us.”

The first half of the book also includes a tutorial on how to preserve flowers, artfully presented (in terms of book design) as if already in another book, and the images in this book are photographs of that previous one.  There is also a section called Tips for Cutting and Preserving Flowers for the Home Vase.  These sections give authority and gravitas to the images, but the images are finally what this book is all about.

The images are Romantic. There are sunlit fields of lavender, old buildings, roses after roses after roses, irises, poppies, and sunflowers. There are images of flowers I cannot name.  There are gardens and terraces and windows and butterflies and flowers in a vase in a corner of an old room in an old house. Oftentimes, Beck is a model in her own images, posing in flowing dresses, a large hat, or nothing at all. The images are not soft focus but insistently soft feeling, which I mean in the most evocative way. 

Painterly, yes. I keep coming back to that idea.

While The Flowers of Provence is certainly an appreciation and celebration of flowers in that region, the book is not a tourist guide, nor is it a field guide for identifying species. The book is not a reference book at all. Instead, these images are themselves the end product. These images are photographic fine art in a classical sense.

Open to any page, and you will encounter a moment of delicate, satisfying, pause-making beauty.

A note from FRAMES: Please let us know if you have an upcoming or recently published photography book.