CJ Hendry’s Flower Market 2.0 | Rockefeller Center
CJ Hendry transformed Rockefeller Center into a riot of color with Flower Market 2.0 twenty-seven plush flower designs, a rare 28th at the Top of the Rock, and a fleeting garden in the heart of Manhattan.
Last night I watched CJ Hendry and her crew setting up under floodlights on Instagram Live. Fabric blooms piled in the dark, Rockefeller’s granite softened by color before the city woke up. Twelve hours later, I was standing in the middle of it a flower market in the heart of Manhattan, chaos and beauty spilling across the plaza.
There were twenty-seven brand-new plush flower designs, each one offered as a gift to whoever reached for it first. The crowd pressed in, children clutching stems like trophies, strangers comparing colors as if they were rare finds. I picked my own flower and held it tight, part souvenir, part performance.
Nearby I spotted artist KahriAnne Kerr reaching for her own flower. That moment said everything about CJ’s work it spoke not only to the public but to peers in the creative world who understood the language of play and spectacle.
From the plaza I carried my flower upward, climbing to the Top of the Rock. There, the 28th design the rare, exclusive edition waited as the city stretched out in every direction. Steel, glass, and now, a single bloom at seventy stories high.
CJ Hendry doesn’t just create objects. She creates moments. And for three days, Rockefeller Center was no longer just stone and commerce. It was a garden, fleeting and alive, proof that wonder can still grow in the unlikeliest places.
Q: What is CJ Hendry’s Flower Market 2.0?
A large-scale immersive art installation at Rockefeller Center, featuring 27 new plush flower designs and an exclusive 28th edition at the Top of the Rock.
Q: How long did the installation run?
Flower Market 2.0 ran from September 19–21, 2025, transforming Center Plaza into a riot of color and play.
Q: Why is this event significant?
Hendry is known for blurring the line between art and consumer desire. By staging a flower market in one of New York’s most iconic public spaces, she expanded her work beyond galleries into everyday life.
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Alison Blickle: Future Ruins
On the eve of her Chelsea opening, I met Alison Blickle at Kravets Wehby Gallery to talk about Future Ruins. The paintings depict radiant, staged figures set in a dystopian future where nature has vanished and people connect only through digital avatars. At once alluring and unsettling, these works blur beauty, grief, and technology, offering both fantasy and warning.
I met Alison Blickle on the eve of her opening at Kravets Wehby Gallery in Chelsea, NYC. The paintings for Future Ruins were already on the walls, glowing under the lights, the room still hushed before the crowd. In that moment, anticipation thick but the space still private, we spoke about beauty, technology, and grief.
Blickle’s figures are radiant, staged, almost too beautiful. She doesn’t hide from it.
“That’s intentional,” she told me.
The new body of work is set in a dystopian future where nature no longer exists as we know it. People still long for connection to something larger, but the only way they can feel it is through avatars inside digital landscapes.
“You create an avatar of yourself, what you wish you looked like, and swim in oceans that no longer exist, walk through forests that have been erased. These paintings are portraits of those avatars. The beauty is stunning, but it’s also artificial. They’re not real people. They’re curated images of who someone chooses to be.”
This dystopian thread runs through Future Ruins like a warning. Filters, AI-generated faces, bodies shaped digitally, all of it feels uncomfortably close.
“It’s science fiction, but it’s also about right now,” she said.
The Cinematic Image
When I asked about the cinematic quality of her compositions, Blickle traced it back to photography.
“I’ve studied images from the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, and I’m inspired by fashion photographers working today. They’re some of the most inventive artists, even though they’re placed in a commercial zone. Their editorials often echo classical painting, history paintings, big groups enacting narratives, dramatic compositions. They create little worlds. That’s what I admire, and what I try to do myself. I stage the image like a photographer before I paint.”
Her women hold archetypes, muses, goddesses, rebels, but they’re also deeply personal. Blickle admits they’ve often been alter egos.
“They get to do things I wish I could do. I live vicariously through them.”
Isolation and Grief
With Future Ruins, that connection is sharper. She spoke about grief and isolation shaping this work.
“For many years I painted large groups interacting. These figures feel more isolated, and many are sad. That’s where the personal heart comes in.”
The result is a body of work that oscillates between allure and critique. The figures are dazzling, but their perfection is unsettling. They carry both the fantasy of beauty and the dystopia of its collapse.
They are avatars, beautiful, artificial, and haunted by longing.
Exhibition: Future Ruins
Alison Blickle
Kravets Wehby Gallery, Chelsea, NYC
September 4 – October 4
Q: What is Alison Blickle’s Future Ruins about?
A: The exhibition imagines a dystopian future where nature has collapsed and people connect through digital avatars. Her radiant figures are both alluring and unsettling, blurring beauty, grief, and technology.
Q: Where is Future Ruins showing?
A: The show is on view at Kravets Wehby Gallery in Chelsea, NYC, from September 4 to October 4, 2025.
Q: Why is Alison Blickle’s work important?
A: Blickle stages cinematic paintings that draw from photography, fashion, and mythology. Her figures act as alter egos, archetypes, and cultural mirrors, exploring beauty’s allure and its collapse in the digital age.
Lilith in Montmartre
From the steps of Sacré-Cœur to the neon streets of Pigalle, I followed a woman who called herself Daughter of Lilith. Montmartre’s sacred crown gave way to Paris’s libertine underworld a walk that became both myth and memory, captured through my lens.
We began on the steps of Sacré-Cœur, the basilica perched like a crown above Montmartre. Floodlights bathed its white stone in a glow that cut against the black sky. The city spread out beneath us in a sea of lamps, quiet and watchful. At night, the crowds thinned, and the hill felt less like a landmark and more like a threshold the entrance to another story.
She stood beside me, calling herself Daughter of Lilith. The name carried weight older than this church, older than Montmartre itself. Lilith: the first woman in Eden, the one who refused to kneel, who chose exile over obedience. Demonized for centuries, then reborn as an icon of defiance and desire.
We walked down the hill, away from the basilica’s bright gaze. Each step felt like shedding layers of sanctity. The streets narrowed, the light dimmed, and the city began to pulse in neon. Pigalle Montmartre’s other face. The sex shops glowed pink and red, buzzing with electricity. The sacred gave way to the libertine.
It wasn’t new. A century earlier, these same streets fed Paris’s libertine movement cabarets, brothels, and cafés where artists, poets, and outsiders lived as they pleased. Montmartre was where morality blurred into spectacle, where desire became its own kind of art.
Through my lens, she became Lilith’s echo striding past glass windows filled with mannequins, past fluorescent signs promising pleasure, past the old cabaret facades where so many myths had been sold before. This wasn’t the Paris of galleries and salons. It was the Paris of shadows and reinvention, where exile could be liberation.
Lilith was cast out of Eden for refusing submission. Pigalle has long been cast out of Paris’s polished image, dismissed as sin. Yet both endure rebranded, reframed, still magnetic. Myths never vanish; they adapt.
That night, I wasn’t photographing a stranger. I was documenting an archetype, walking downhill from heaven into neon, carrying a story that has been retold for thousands of years and still hasn’t lost its power.
Q: What is Pigalle known for?
A: Pigalle, in Paris’s 18th arrondissement, is famous for its neon lit nightlife, sex shops, and cabarets like the Moulin Rouge. Historically, it was also a center of the city’s libertine movement, where artists, writers, and outsiders gathered.
Q: Who was Lilith in mythology?
A: Lilith is a figure from Mesopotamian and Jewish mythology, often described as Adam’s first wife who refused submission and chose exile. Once demonized, she has since been reimagined as a symbol of independence, sexuality, and rebellion.
Q: Why is Montmartre important for artists?
A: Montmartre has been a hub for artists since the 19th century, home to figures like Picasso, Modigliani, and Toulouse Lautrec. Its cafés, cabarets, and bohemian culture nurtured movements that shaped modern art and mythologized Paris as a creative capital.
If you’re looking for cinematic, story-driven photography that captures moments you can’t script get in touch here. contact@peterkoloff.com
Tokyo in the Rain Shibuya Street Photography & Yakuza Encounter | Peter Koloff
The Prestige Diaries: In 2023, I wandered Shibuya’s neon-lit streets in the rain, camera in hand, chasing the scene I’d always imagined. Just before dawn, I met the Yakuza and walked away with images, memories, and a story I’ll never forget.
Tokyo has a way of pulling you in. In 2023, I spent a night wandering Shibuya’s streets for hours waiting, watching, hoping for rain. The neon lights reflected off wet pavement in my imagination long before the first drop actually fell.
It had been raining lightly, just enough to slick the streets and make the city glow. Around midnight, I met a few people, exchanged smiles, took a handful of portraits. The city felt alive but patient, as if holding back its real story until it was ready to share.
And then I saw them.
A small group of men stood on a side street, looking every bit like they were “connected.” Sharp suits, subtle confidence, the kind of presence you don’t mistake for anything else. I approached, camera in hand, and asked if I could take their photo. They didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak Japanese until a man stepped out of a black Mercedes, lit by the glow of a streetlight. He became my translator.
“They all work together,” he said, with a knowing look.
One man, clearly the leader, locked eyes with me. He pointed and said something in Japanese. I didn’t understand the words, but somehow I understood the meaning: wait. He removed his coat, then pulled down his shirt to reveal an intricate tapestry of Yakuza tattoos a lifetime of stories inked into his skin.
I raised my camera. Click.
Then something unexpected happened. He gave an order, and suddenly the others began slipping bills into my pockets. I tried to refuse I wasn’t there for money but they insisted. It was surreal.
By 4AM, the streets were nearly empty, my pockets heavier than when I arrived, and my memory card full of images I could never have scripted.
For most of my career, my images have spoken for themselves. As a dyslexic photographer, putting the story into words was always the hardest part. Now, with AI helping me shape and refine my thoughts, I can finally share the scene as I lived it not just the way it looked, but the way it felt.
Tokyo had given me its story. And now, I get to give it to you.
Moments like this don’t happen twice. In 2023, I was lucky enough to capture one now I’m finally telling the story behind it.
If you’ve ever seen one of my images and wondered what was happening outside the frame, follow along I’m sharing more of the untold stories that live behind my lens.
FAQ Tokyo in the Rain Photography
Q: Who took the Tokyo in the rain Yakuza photographs?
A: Photographer Peter Koloff captured the images in Shibuya, Tokyo, in 2023.
Q: Where were the photos taken?
A: In the Shibuya district of Tokyo, Japan, during a rainy night in 2023.
Q: What is unique about these photographs?
A: They feature a rare street encounter with Yakuza members, including one revealing traditional tattoos.
Long before Tokyo, I found myself in Venice at 3AM — alone, with a camera, chasing whatever story the night would give me.
If you’re looking for cinematic, story-driven photography that captures moments you can’t script get in touch here. contact@peterkoloff.com
Venice, 3AM: How AI Helped Me Find My Creative Voice (2017
A sleepless night in Venice became the moment I found my creative voice—years before AI became my tool.
I wandered the alleys of Venice at 3AM with no plan just a camera, a little insomnia, and the urge to create.
That night I captured moments that haunted me for years: a woman smoking alone on a bridge, a man in the distance walking under orange streetlight, and a sunrise over a rain-slicked Piazza San Marco.
But for years, I never told the story because I didn’t have the words. I only had the images.
Today, with AI helping me find language, rhythm, and voice, I’m finally sharing what I saw and what I felt — that night.
This was the moment I began to realize I wasn’t just a photographer. I was a storyteller.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How did AI help you write this blog post?
A: I took the photos in 2017, but never shared the story. In 2025, I used AI tools to help me structure my thoughts and put my experience into words. AI helped unlock the voice behind the visuals.
Q: Does using AI make the story less personal?
A: Not at all. The story, emotions, and memory are mine AI simply helped me express it clearly.
Want more behind-the-scenes stories? Read about the Cannes Film Festival here.
Inside the Cannes Festival: A Lens on Glamour, Authenticity, and the Unexpected
A behind-the-scenes visual diary from the 78th Cannes Film Festival glamour, tension, and cinematic intimacy captured by Peter Koloff.
Every year in May, the Croisette transforms. Cannes becomes not just a celebration of cinema, but a magnet for beauty, branding, and bold moments both polished and raw.
This year I covered the festival from the opening day through the closing ceremony. Days flowed from morning market screenings to late night premieres. The Martinez Hotel pulsed as a hub where one minute you'd spot a major director slipping out quietly, the next an influencer entourage staging elaborate photo ops on the stairs.
What struck me most? The contrasts:
Film lovers in vintage tuxedos grabbing burgers at McDonald’s between screenings.
Young content creators sneaking behind the scenes shots with the Martinez chefs.
A stylist from Elie Saab, off-duty, glowing in the sunset after a week dressing A listers.
Conversations with true cinephiles people who still come here for the films, eyes lit up after a 9 AM screening in Salle Debussy.
Cannes is both spectacle and substance. Yes, there’s curated glamour but underneath, there’s still passion for storytelling. The camera sees both.
For brands, artists, and creators navigating this world: the opportunity is in embracing both layers the beautiful surface and the authentic narrative behind it. That’s where lasting images live.
Photography & content strategy inquiries: Contact here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What inspired you to shoot behind the scenes at Cannes?
A: I wanted to photograph the moments no one notices the quiet between flashes, the human energy behind curated glamour. It’s where truth hides.
Q: What makes this coverage different from typical event photography?
A: I wasn’t assigned. I embedded myself. I moved like a ghost in a world of spectacle and that gave me access to something more honest than staged red carpets.
Q: How does AI factor into your creative process?
A: The camera captures what I see. AI helps me put what I see into words. It lets me shape the story faster without losing what makes it personal.
Years before Cannes, I found myself alone in Venice at 3AM with a camera and no plan. This is what I captured.