Florian Braakman – She Comes in Colours

She Comes in Colours by Florian Braakman, (self published, 2014), BUY

Florian Braakman’s She Comes in Colours presents us with a collection of an eclectic mixture of images and subject matter, along with a rather beautiful sense of narrative. However, this narrative is not what we might argue as being a narrative in the tradition sense; rather, it is a series of potential narratives with which the viewer can engage and relate with.

The range of images and subject matter Braakman opens up for us, equally opens up possibilities for the viewer. Is this a story of loss? Love, Grief, romance, journeys, ambition, family? Perhaps it is all of these and more. It would be near impossible to whittle it down to one or even two of these aspects, for the depth shown suggests a certain amount of reading and looking between the images is as key as the images themselves.

This is indeed a story of all these things. It is also, more importantly, a story of how these aspects of life connect with one another, inform one another and are familiar to us all. It is also a story of how we mark these events and happenings in our lives; not with the ceremonial images which adorn the walls, but with the small, banal seeming markers which are closer to the ‘punctum’ in Barthes’ Camera Lucida. It is a story of how we engage with these parts of life in the most minuscule of ways to form something much greater.