A Green Wave | Jefferey Milstein Large-format color transparency, 2002

Architect, photographer, and author Jeffrey Milstein became interested in photographing flowers and gardens as the former owner of the design and publishing studio Paper House Productions, a photographic greeting and note card company which he founded in 1983. "I started photographing single flowers because they look very iconographic," he says.

For his recent series of photographs, "The Tulip Project," Milstein selected tulips, along with a few peonies and roses, from his wife's garden in Woodstock. A Green Wave is a portrait of a Parrot Tulip. This is Milstein's second Chronogram cover; our September 2004 issue featured Scrap Metal #1, from a series of large-format photographs of scrap yards.

For "The Tulip Project," Milstein photographed the flowers individually in his studio against a white background, permitting a small amount of shadow to give each one a three-dimensional quality. "I presented each flower as an idealized, beautiful object on its own, with nothing around it, much like a botanist would have drawn in the past," he says. "In a traditional botanical drawing, a flower is presented singly, and very symmetrically, with the drawing really capturing its essence. I wanted the flower photographs to look like that—very rich, full of beauty and detail."

Milstein's photographs have been shown at the Donskoj Gallery in Kingston, the Kleinert/James Art Center in Woodstock, and the Dorsky Museum in New Paltz, as well as in Portland, Oregon; New York City; and Italy. Throughout May, "The Tulip Project" will be exhibited at his studio/gallery, Studio 331, Inc., located at 331 Wall Street in Kingston. (845) 331-3111; www.jeffreymilstein.com.