Photographs by Herb Kaplan

Herb Kaplan’s photographs will be on exhibit at Gallery 18 at the Riverdale Y May 1- May 30, 2019; 5625 Arlington Avenue, Bronx, NY 10471.

All are invited to the Opening Reception on Sunday, May 5, 2019 from 1:30-3:30 PM.

A US Navy Veteran with an engineering degree from Cornell University, MBA from Harvard, and a career in business both in the corporate world and as an independent consultant, Herb Kaplan has been taking very up close and personal photographs of flowers and plants for more than ten years. Many of these images were shot at Wave Hill and the New York Botanical Garden. He has been influenced by the work of the artist Georgia O’Keeffe who explored the inherent beauty and shape of certain flowers. In many of his photographs he has focused on the flower as he imagined she would have.

A member of the Riverdale Art Association, Kaplan has had his work shown at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in New York City. “I want the viewer to be drawn into the essence of nature and be mesmerized by nature’s extraordinary beauty…..the closer I get to a flower or plant the more it seems to reveal.”

Herb Kaplan’s photographs capture nature’s essence from up close. They zoom in to flora and fauna allowing us to ponder the extraordinary colors, patterns and geometry all around us, A petal here, a stamen there, an unsuspecting lizard, seen through the extreme close up lens of Kaplan all take us to a timeless place where a rose is not just a rose, but a world of luscious shapes and colors. A cluster of orange colored petals might be a mum or not. The gray and deeply scored “Pancake Rocks” of New Zealand rise mysteriously in their frame as we wonder what they are. A close up of a neon green lizard draped over a mossy branch seems to capture the animal in private thought. Some of the pictures are intentionally cropped in such a way so that the viewer might not immediately recognize what the subject is. And so these colorful visual effects draw us in to the mystery of nature’s awe inspiring beauty.

For more information please contact Maria Neuda at wordturner@cs.com, 718 687 8025 or Hal Katz at hal.katz@gmail.com, 347 275 5459.