THE HOURGLASS

To look at a still life by the photographer Andrea Gentl is to see an object—a persimmon, a mussel on the half shell, a charred endive—as if for the first time. The facets of a peeled blood orange, say, have never seemed so clear and elegantly composed. “I like to look at the details in things,” Gentl says. Gentl especially likes to look at the details in organic material, a habit she picked up while growing up on a small farm in the woods in Western Massachusetts. “I spent a lot of time outside, filling my pockets with rocks and sticks and acorns,” she says. “It’s just the same way now. Whenever I go to the beach, I’m always leaving with a bag of stuff. Smelly seaweed, broken shells.”

As half of the husband-and-wife team Gentl and Hyers, she regularly shoots food, interiors and travel stories for publications like Bon Appétit, Martha Stewart and Condé Nast Traveler. Her celebrated commercial work tends toward a light, buoyant tone. But on her own time, Gentl likes to explore organic material that is not shiny and new but rather in a state of romantic decay. “Sometimes flowers look more beautiful when they’re dead than when you first bring them home,” she says. “Peonies or poppies, for instance. Each one is going to decay and look completely different. Sometimes they end up being translucent, like raw silk or tattered cloth.” To capture botanicals at each stage of decomposition, Gentl might photograph the same group of flowers many times over a period of weeks. “What I do is I take the flowers when they’re fresh and I lay them out on a really big surface and I start to deconstruct them a little bit,” she says. “And then I just kind of let them decay. They might be in the same spot for a month or more, changing in the light.”

For Whisper Editions, Gentl has selected an exquisite image from her study of dried poppies. “It’s just barely lit, and there are these little hits of light, making things come out of the darkness or give just the hint of a color,” Gentl says of the exclusive print. “It’s really about the darkness and things kind of emerging from it and receding into it. It’s almost like a secret garden or a secret world.”

Shop Gentl's edition for Whisper here.