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"Flowers and landscapes are at the heart of Ori Gersht&amp;#039;s mesmerizing photographs\u2014&amp;quot;just what artists have been looking at for all of time,&amp;quot; explains Al Miner, a curator of contemporary art at Boston&amp;#039;s Museum of Fine Arts, where Gersht will have his first museum survey next summer. &amp;quot;Except,&amp;quot; Miner continues, &amp;quot;he blows them up.&amp;quot; Quite literally. For his 2006 series &amp;quot;Exploding Flowers,&amp;quot; the Tel Aviv\u2013born, London-based artist worked with a florist to create elaborate bouquets inspired, he says, by Henri Fantin-Latour&amp;#039;s lush 19th-century still lifes. Gersht clicked the camera&amp;#039;s shutter as each bouquet was ignited with a small explosive. The resulting photographs are gorgeous and a little unnerving; the artist describes them as &amp;quot;celebratory and violent.&amp;quot; The blues, whites, and reds of Blow Up: Untitled 4, for example, evoke the bloodiness of the French Revolution. One can&amp;#039;t help but also recall the shattering images of war we see in the news\u2014and that Gersht has experienced firsthand\u2014in the Middle East. &amp;quot;An element in them relates to the idea of a suicide bomber disguised by the color and beauty of the flowers,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;The moment of destruction becomes the moment of creation.&amp;quot;  Gersht&amp;#039;s career is exploding too. A graduate of the master&amp;#039;s program at London&amp;#039;s Royal College of Art, the photographer is on a creative tear. This past summer alone, Gersht had solo shows at CRG Gallery in New York and at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Meanwhile, he continues to travel throughout Europe and beyond to shoot new photographs and short films, including a video he made at a bullfight in Andalusia, which was part of a group exhibition organized by Ron Arad at London&amp;#039;s Roundhouse.  Despite the occasional real-life fireworks, Gersht&amp;#039;s work more often is infused with a fragile, fleeting beauty. His recent CRG show, &amp;quot;Falling Petals,&amp;quot; featured large-scale photographs of cherry trees in Japan. &amp;quot;I was constantly chasing the cherry blossoms,&amp;quot; says Gersht. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re so ephemeral, with their transition from full bloom to decay.&amp;quot; He captured many of those blooms\u2014thousands of petals, in fact\u2014not on their branches but in the air, frozen at the millisecond between life and death. The backstory: Gersht learned that kamikaze pilots used to carry branches of cherry blossoms, a Japanese symbol for the cycle of life, on their missions. Many of the images were taken in Japanese cities affected by World War II. &amp;quot;I started my journey in Hiroshima,&amp;quot; he recalls. &amp;quot;I was trembling when I got there. The bomb defined our times, always over our heads.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Hide and Seek,&amp;quot; a 2008\u20132009 series on marshlands in Eastern Europe, has an equally delicate, languid quality, at least on the surface, with misty horizons and liquid reflections melting into one. Moved by Primo Levi&amp;#039;s If Not Now, When?, a 1984 novel about Jewish partisans on the move through Poland and Germany during the Second World War, Gersht traversed these deserted landscapes, hiring a forester with a Jeep to help him try to find where the actual partisans had hidden. It was a potentially futile exercise\u2014it&amp;#039;s not as if these locations are on a map\u2014but one with an artful outcome. &amp;quot;For me, this is about the dichotomy between Jews in diaspora imagining a utopian place that can never be attained, and Zionists attempting to make that Utopia real, with Israel. The whole process for me was how to capture places simultaneously physical and metaphysical.&amp;quot;  The series is a poignant example of Gersht&amp;#039;s singular approach to his medium, one informed as much by personal history and art history\u2014he mentions both Goya and Eug\u00E8ne Atget as important influences\u2014as by political violence. &amp;quot;At the heart of Gersht&amp;#039;s work is a complexity that mirrors the complexity of our world,&amp;quot; the MFA&amp;#039;s Miner says. &amp;quot;He acknowledges that lightness and darkness, past and present, beauty and violence coexist in everything we see. \u00ADGersht understands the way memory both serves and fails us.&amp;quot; Click here to see images of Ori Gersht&amp;#039;s work. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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