Sydney and Flora

Published in 2009 by Turtle Point Press
120 pages, 90 color and 2 black and white photographs, hardcover
Foreword by Susanna Moore

Sydney and Flora features Geoffrey Biddle's photographs of his aunt and uncle, Flora and Sydney Biddle, on the occasion of his uncle's 80th Birthday. The startling color images, in which he superimposes photographs of his uncle with photographs of his aunt, explore love, aging, life and death, the complexities of family ties, and the power of the family unit. Indeed, as Biddle explains, “photographing my family–’figuring out my family’–was the first thing that interested me about taking pictures, and it has been the consistent thread through my career.”

The resulting photographs, compiled in the newly released tome, Sydney and Flora, are eerie, striking and often humorous layered mash-ups of the couple’s individual portraits. In some shots, eyes float where mouths should be, or ears, noses and mouths double — a Picasso painting come to life. In others, features are neatly stacked on top of one another, causing a sensation not unlike viewing a 3-D image...

—Jordan Dacayanan, San Francisco Book Review

The photographs — playful, dreamlike and occasionally grotesque — are arresting meditations on identity and partnership and on the endless number of ways two can be one.

—Ryan Davies, Turnaround.UK