Piper Smith Builds Flowers Into Sculptures, One Layered Angle at a Time

Piper Smith spent well over a year shooting a single body of flower photographs, The Way of Flowers, and its most minimal image — Three, a slender stem in a ceramic vase barely an inch tall — became the series' award winner. The Hell's Kitchen, New York-based fine art photographer builds each picture by rotating a flower in her apartment studio, shooting it from many angles, and merging selected frames into one layered image in Photoshop.

"I don't think of a photograph as one single moment—I'm circling something, gathering angles, and building those layers back together, so what you end up with feels more like a sculpture of a subject than a snapshot of it," Smith told Epiphany Knedler in a Lenscratch interview published October 27th, 2026.

Where did the series come from?

The Way of Flowers began during the Covid-19 pandemic, but not with flowers. Smith walked to Central Park, found a tree set apart from the others, circled it several times, and shot it from different angles. Back in the studio, she layered those viewpoints in Photoshop, keeping each perspective faintly visible, then manipulated the color. The result was Ghost Tree. After roughly thirty trees, a friend challenged her to change direction, so she set up a small studio in her apartment and applied the same rotational method to a single flower. That image, Ethereal, grew into the full series.

The lockdown echoed something older. "When I was a child, I never wanted a garden… I much preferred Art to Weeding, coloring with my 2 favorite crayons, the brick red and the forest green," Smith writes in her artist statement. She drew flowers on blank paper and "planted" them on her bedroom walls — not pretty flowers, but what she calls angry flowers, sad flowers, cheerful flowers. Grocery-delivery bouquets during the pandemic returned her to that childhood practice. She printed the photographs and arranged them across her studio, recreating the act of covering walls with drawings. "The magic is seeing the flower in your mind's eye, the excitement of the beginning," she writes. "The science is standing back and thinking how to make it real, how to get the long stem to balance on the candlestick." Friends lent her unusual vases and containers; Whole Foods supplied a wide variety of blooms.

What does Three achieve?

Three remains Smith's favorite image from the series. She shot the tiny vase from her usual spread of angles, then chose three frames and merged them. She describes its appeal in terms of craft: "There's something about how minimal it is—just balance and line and quiet—that feels like the purest version of what I was going for with the whole series." Interviewer Epiphany Knokendler — Knedler, an Assistant Professor of Art and Chair of the Art Department at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota — situates the work within an art-historical frame, reading it alongside Plato's Theory of Forms and the flower as the imitation of beauty her students reach for first.

What shaped the practice?

Smith came to photography by way of performance. She earned a BFA from the Goodman Theater School of Drama in Chicago, then worked as a stage actor and commercial spokesperson before representing illustrators, which ignited her interest in the medium. She studied at ICP, SVA, and Parsons, and continues training under Christopher Giglio's THE GRAMMAR OF PHOTOGRAPHY, a program she likens to graduate study. Her exhibition record includes 1650 Gallery, Jadite Gallery, Hobart Gallery, The Pleiades Gallery, Viridian Artists, Praxis Gallery, PhotoPlace, Soho Photo Gallery, Hudson Guild, Grey Cube, and the BW Athens Photography International Exhibition in 2023. She also completed the 6th Development Program at BH Photo.

What comes after the flowers?

Two newer projects already branch away from the studio. No Exit came from walking her Hell's Kitchen neighborhood with a camera — skyscrapers, parking signs, a mannequin in a store window — and the feeling of a dark canyon with brightly lit buildings above and no way out. A trip to Greenland, shooting icebergs from a RIB boat close enough to taste the ice, followed by work in the high desert outside Santa Fe on lava mountains, hoodoos and buttes, revealed how close those opposed landscapes felt. That observation became her next project, Grounding Truth.

Her fall schedule is concrete: late August in Portugal for several weeks, shooting open-air markets, the Cais do Sodré and Bairro Alto neighborhoods of old Lisbon, and traditional Mercados de Ciganos. Work from No Exit then appears in a feature exhibition opening October 8th at Soho Photo Gallery, 539 W 23rd Street, New York, and a group show opening October 17th at FOMA in Santa Fe — two venues that will test whether her layered, sculptural method translates from flowers to the built environment.