John Priola’s exhibition of ten recent photographic prints, Natural Light/ Symbiosis, slyly exemplifies such moments, eliciting slow and careful looking.

Priola’s photographs are dense the way that nature is dense — in part because they are of nature, but also because his compositions feel like microscopic examinations of multitudes. Visual clutter rarely produces such tranquility as it does here.

Pretty posies, foliage arranged seemingly just so around a black void and pink Belladonna sprouting in a barren side yard. At first glance, the photos in J. John Priola’s new book are perhaps simply snapshots of ikebana-like arrangements and Google Street View-style captures of plants surviving against the odds in sometimes rather stark urban settings.

There’s also J. John Priola’s gorgeous photograph of a bouquet — titled “Bouquet” — featuring hand-crafted flowers made by 20 different San Francisco cultural organizations and nonprofits, a gorgeous representation of the city itself. 

J. John Priola presents the archival pigment he calls Bouquet, which is such a pure interpretation of this ongoing mission. A graduate of SFAI, Priolo describes, “In manifesting and realizing Bouquet, I asked over 49 organizations, institutions and individuals to make flowers that represented their cultures and communities.”