Bearing His Flowers | Stephanie Taiber

Bearing His Flowers

Stephanie Taiber

Released April 2023

Photographs by Stephanie Taiber
Essay by Akiko Busch

Hardcover, 9.5 x 6.7 inches
80 pages + two 8-page booklets + one 6-page gatefold
Edition of 350

ISBN: 978-1-949608-33-5
Trade Edition: $40.00

Bearing His Flowers explores how vulnerability and inner-strength interact with experience to shape identity. Inspired by literature and nature, images of waves, pleats of a young girl’s skirt, and the weave of a rope cycling around itself echo emotional fluctuations and mimic the mind’s tendency to reconstruct personal narratives. Fragmented and layered images embrace a network of feelings, evoking the essential value of events connected to life’s imprinting moments.

A code of metaphors hint at the emotional ramifications of restrictive gender norms. The construct of gendered identity acts as both a protective and destructive force which interferes with ambition and complicates fulfillment for many women and girls who learn to endure, often silently, within this narrow framework. The casualty is self-worth. Bearing His Flowers seeks to identify something central that resides within, some beauty of resilience that fills a private space, even through despair.

The book title is a phrase borrowed from Mrs. Dalloway, a Virginia Woolf novel steeped in ideas of worth, power, depression, and alleviation. The word “bearing” holds a confluence of meanings. A way of being, an offering? A support, or perhaps pressure? An endurance? Maybe, it is all these at once.