THE HOURGLASS

Alice Gao was studying economics in college when, one summer, she bought a camera. “I decided to get a SLR,” she says. “I emptied out my bank account and found someone on Craigslist. I had this really shady transaction out in the middle of the street in New York. From then on, I just got really into it.”

Gao worked corporate jobs for a while after graduating, then, in 2011, quit the corporate work to pursue photography full time. She also joined a little online networking service called Instagram. There, she posted her favorite photos — mostly still life, artfully arranged. Sometime in the fall of 2011, Gao began to pick up followers at a speed even she didn’t quite understand. As her Instagram account grew to attract hundreds of thousands of fans, Gao began to shoot for a variety of print publications, including Kinfolk, Anthology, and T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

For Whisper Editions, Gao has collaborated with a florist, Pretty Street Botanicals, to create an exquisite still life image of the kind her Instagram followers are treated to daily. It depicts a single peony, resting on a mantle. “I’m not really a photojournalist,” Gao says. “Rather than find that perfect moment when a stranger walks by on the street, I prefer to arrange the frame. Still life resonates with what I find beautiful.” Gao’s Instagram followers — there are more than 732,000 of them — seem to agree.