Therapy Flowers Book & Compilation

With Therapy Flowers, the Cologne-based literary scholar and art historian Michaela Predeick provides a photographic artifact of psychotherapy. In this volume she collects 60 photographs of bouquets and flower arrangements taken in the waiting room of a psychotherapeutic practice in Cologne. The number of pictures is not arbitrary but results from the number of sessions that the statutory health insurance companies grants for initial applications for long-term therapy for behavioral therapies. Within this contingent of hours, work is done to improve the mental health of the patients and thus to increase their quality of life. Predeick's photographs, meanwhile, focus on a seemingly minor aspect of the weekly therapy visit: the design of the waiting area of the practice. Each conversation with the therapist is preceded by a short and "wordless encounter" with a fresh bouquet of flowers, which she captures in a photographic picture.