The first factoid about Holland our grade-school minds absorb is its production of tulips. Tulips and canals—that’s Holland. Or it was for a couple of years, at least. Of course, the semi-glossy pages of our reductionist “world history” books lied (as they usually do), and we would find out later how Holland is much, much more than its colorful, bulbous exports. Still, tulips did indeed factor greatly in the development of Holland’s horticulture and even economy, where the flower sowed the seeds of Europe’s possibly first (popped) speculative bubble.

But onto more aesthetic matters. Tulips were always prized for their delicate form and bright colors, the vast polychromatic range of which was never faithfully depicted in our history books of yore. French photographer Normann Szkop‘s tulip “project,” on the other hand, capture the bulbs in all their true technicolor glory. Click through for more!

Szkop took to the air above the tulip fields of Anna Paulowna in North Holland to snap his images, which depict millions of flowers of just about every shade and color you can think of (except pure blue, as it turns out).The color verges on artificial, making the tiny windmills look even more like toys. Fields like these contribute to the $700 million worth of flowers Holland produces and sells every year. See more on Szkop Flickr page.

All photographs: Normann Szkop

[via Colossal]

by Samuel Medina

posted in Uncategorized

tagged aerial photography, color, flowers, holland, Normann Szkop, photography, polychromy, tulips, windmills

more articles by Samuel Medina