In 2020, during the Covid lockdowns, Brendan Barry photographed wildflowers using a camera obscura and darkroom he had constructed, initially out of a garden shed and later in a disused gym. The flowers were not bought: each day Barry walked with his pregnant partner and daughter around their neighbourhood, gathering California poppy, cow parsley, cornflower, Queen Anne’s lace, hogweed, field scabious, dove’s foot crane’s bill and meadow buttercup, and bringing them home to arrange in vases. That routine — walk, pick, arrange, sit for hours — became the armature of the work, which Barry has described as being about family at heart.

The exposures were made from inside the camera, directly onto photosensitive chromogenic paper, using two analogue processes. One relied on a simple paper negative; the other was a colour-reversal method Barry devised himself. Time was unpredictable: a successful exposure could take up to eight hours, and as ambient temperature and chemical concentration changed, colour balance and exposure values fluctuated, making each image precariously unique and impossible to replicate.

That instability gives the pictures their character. The flowers remain recognisable, but the process pulls them toward a hybrid space between the chemical and the natural — a fusion of the still-life tradition that celebrates the transience of flowers and a method that transforms them into something stranger. Barry has said he cannot predict what an image will become, and the book’s forty-eight plates carry the evidence of that uncertainty.

GOST Books has produced the volume at large scale: 292 by 350 millimetres, 88 pages, hardback. The publisher lists a December 2025 publication date. The book documents work made under specific constraints, with domestic intimacy as much a subject as floral form.