Cecelia Webber Uses Naked Bodies to Create Human Flowers

Los Angeles-based Cecelia Webber takes nude photos of the human body and assembles them in the shape of flowers and butterflies, to create some of the most stunning images you’ve ever seen.

Three years ago, Cecelia Webber was a neuroscience graduate from USC, working in the lab all day and indulging in photography in her spare time. And then one day, it happened… “It was an accident, really,” the young artist told Modern Luxury. “I shot a nude figure against a black background and it looked so much like a petal I just went with it.” A Photoshop expert, Webber began layering hundreds of photographs she shot into a single piece to create vibrantly colored flowers made up entirely of the human body. Legs became petals, arms became stamen, and she kept finding new ways of turning instances of the human form into parts of her unique flowers.

But while she does use Photoshop to create her stunning images, Webber’s work isn’t as easy as you might think. The production process requires serious sketching and planning to figure out exactly what kind of poses are needed for each project. She often takes over 50 photos of a single pose to make sure she achieves the perfect form. Then comes the hard part – digitally cutting, rotating, coloring and assembling the human nudes into complex flowers. She layers up to 700 images to achieve the desired effect and sometimes works as long as two months on a single piece. But all that hard work pays off in the end, as the finished pieces are always stunning to look at.

The most difficult part is orchestrating the relationships between the different poses,
and thinking of the human body as a three dimensional object collapsed into a 2D plane to form a shape‘ Webber says. She has recently created series on birds and butterflies out of human nudes and plans an entire exhibition on sea creatures.