I live in Holland, Michigan, which has an annual touristy Tulip Time festival. It is sometimes something to be avoided by locals due to increase in vehicle and foot traffic.
The city plants well over a million bulbs a year, which are cold-stored at a range of temperatures and planted on a staggered schedule so they bloom on a staggered schedule...Michigan weather being as unpredictable as it is. Some years it's 80F/27C and other years there is snow. Tourists are disappointed if there is a 'stem fest' due to the bulbs all blooming and dying before the festival starts or haven't opened at all due to lingering snow.
It seems wasteful to dig up the bulbs and dump them in a city tulip graveyard for the community to take home for their own use, but if the bulbs are left in the ground they will do whatever nature allows them to do on their own schedule.
There are posters created by local artists, but the organization has always been uptight and conservative photography...obsessed with realism and hyper-realism in paintings. There were a few that were less real and more graphic-arts-like. Color photography never got accepted by the poster committee, which was also strange...that met the realism goal...
I began to look at the hyper-real closeup renderings as surreal, because some of the tulip renderings were many times larger than reality. I imagined them to be 4-5 m tall, a danger to human passersby, if a stem were to break. It they had a perfume it would be overpowering as one flew among them on the back of a 1 m bumblebee.
I do not need to see another painting of yellow tulips with an insect on one of them.
I prefer to see them in stages of decay, defocus, backlighting, etc. I mean them no harm, but am bored with the traditional presentation.
So this photo offers an alternative interpretation. Thank you.
