“I first began shooting flowers in the mid 80′s. I would go up to the roof of my small Greenwich Village studio and hold blossoms up against the sky to see the translucence of the petals. That series of 35mm photographs was entitled Sky Flowers and I had many of them printed as dye transfers and cibachromes.

In the late 90′s I began to experiment with digital photography and became one of the first to use a scanner as a camera. This resulted in seven books of large format color photographs and the Smithsonian Computer World Award for digital photography in 2000.

During the production of my first book, One Hundred Flowers, I became so absorbed by the flowers that I would awake at night and write short poems inspired by them. This soon became my collection I call, A Garden of Psalms. Here is one of them:

You would not contain yourself!
All that light
All that love.
In a sun,
In a galaxy,
In a flower.
Some call it the big bang.

LIFE Magazine later created a short video of my flower photographs using the same title.”

Yellow Vermillion Gerber, 2006

“Oh God!  I just want to pay tribute to it all! I want to exclaim and proclaim and sing the joyous sounds of tribute and awe to all that my eyes behold!

Whatever is within the flowers is within us. We are a part of this universe! Whether I’m looking at a human hand or looking the galaxies of shooting stars or the flight of a bird…something marvelous is going on and I’m part of it. We’re all part of it!”