Close-up photographs of lush blossoms—flowers at their most seductive—were a highlight of Pierre-Olivier Arnaud’s recent show at Skopia. And yet this seductiveness seemed to come at us from a distance, muted by the photographic medium itself. Although the size of the prints—many are quite large—gives them a real presence, they have an almost faded, washed-out look to them, like afterimages asserting a merely transient effect on our retinas or as if we had glimpsed the blossoms by the light of long-extinguished galaxies in the night sky. A reduction of all contrasts turned