Description
And the second series, named by the author "Lilies" (1991), because the lilies really were. It's about paper flowers that the photographer gave to the patients of a mental hospital posing for him. Czekmieniew tells us that he also brought them candy and cigarettes. But there was apparently something else in his dealings with these people that made them smile for a moment on their faces tainted by mental illness. The smile made many of the patients look completely normal in the photo. Doctors say that one patient's encounter with the photographer helped her recover from chronic depression - excerpt from article Tatiana Pavlova, "Photos for a Passport" and "Lilies" by Alexander Chekhnev