Flowers Shall Grow

Flowers Shall Grow is the debut monograph from Norway-based photographer Julie Pike, a hot-foil-embossed cloth hardcover issued in a numbered edition of 460 copies by the Oslo imprint Éditions du LIC.

Taking its title from a line of Edvard Munch's writing, the book collects images of nude and semi-nude figures glimpsed deep in Norwegian forests, alone beside dark water, or observed in sparse domestic interiors, shot in the low, harsh light of the Scandinavian sun. The publisher describes the pictures as playful on their surface but threaded with melancholy and coded symbolism, returning to timeless Scandinavian themes of death, the cycle of life, and the body's symbiosis with nature; the sequence is pitched less as a single narrative than as fictional fragments, like stills from a film that was never made. The book runs 88 pages with 64 colour plates, offset-printed, and is now out of print.

Pike was born in Edinburgh and raised in Norway and Denmark, and studied at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco before settling in Oslo in 2001. She works primarily as an editorial and commercial fashion photographer, and is a Canon Europe Ambassador whose clients have included Nylon, Vice, Elle, and Sony Music. She has also shown fine-art work since 2003, including at Art Basel Miami (2010), the Preus National Museum of Photography (2012), and the Female Gaze exhibition at Oslo Negativ Photo Festival (2021).