Lily Studies

Lily Studies is a series of Polaroid photographs made during COVID, while the artist was isolated at home. The works began as a quiet, meditative engagement with lilies, but they extend Leder’s broader investigation of looking, framing, and the instability of recognition. Isolated against dark grounds, the flowers become compact, sculptural forms, moving between botanical subject, body, object, and abstraction. The softened focus, compressed tonal range, and physical character of the Polaroid shift attention away from description and toward perception. The lilies are not presented as decorative still lifes, but as forms under pressure: folded, luminous, partially withheld. Like Leder’s other bodies of work, the series asks how images are constructed through distance, framing, surface, and the viewer’s desire to make meaning from what remains unresolved.