Maia Flore makes photographs that behave like short poems, and she is usually the one inside them. In her pictures, a body arches face-first into a hillside of magenta blossoms, stretches flat as a plank between two yellow bollards against a pink wall, or drifts weightless across a starfield as light breaks over a mountain ridge. The scenes are staged with a dancer's precision and a comedian's timing. Her figure rarely shows its face. It serves more as a line or a shape set in dialogue with rock, sky, and bloom.
Born in 1988, Flore divides her time between Catalonia and California, and both landscapes feed her work. Sun-bleached desert granite, saturated coastal color, and the hard midday light of the American West sit alongside a softer Mediterranean glow. Her work has been exhibited in galleries in Paris, San Francisco, and New York. In 2015, she received the HSBC Photography Prize, which led to a monograph with Actes Sud. Two more books followed, in 2020 and 2024.
Flore says play is the best way she knows to get work done, and it shows. Her images lead with a visual joke, such as a blurred hand whose fingers rhyme with three palm trees, and then reward a longer look at their careful construction of color, scale, and gesture. The humor is part of how the poetry works.
For this Visual Q+A, we asked Maia Flore to answer in images.
Who are you?
Why photography?
What is your trademark photographic style?
What truly inspires vou?
Where do you go when you close your eyes?
Where is home for you?
How would you describe your lifestyle?
What makes a great shot?
How do you view the world?
What is an important lesson you have learned?
