After I had finished the flower reflections series, I began a series of portraits of flowers, all done in studio. While the flower reflections showed how random life could be, I wanted to try to master photography in a more controlled way and hence the flower portraits series was born. While I working on this series in 2008, the financial world was brought to its knees and I wanted to use my work as a way to link to the credit crisis caused by the latest financial bubble—the housing market.

Living in the Netherlands means I’ve read a lot about Dutch history and culture. Immediately as Lehman fell and the crisis took off, I saw links to the tulip mania of 1636. At that time, the price of certain tulips had sky rocketed by so much that some could even be sold for more than the price of a canal house in Amsterdam. And so the trade in tulips with these insanely inflated prices resulted in one of the first recorded financial bubbles.

You’d have thought that in almost 400 years, we might have learned something. Yet, once again, this crisis showed us the ugly side of human nature—what happens when we let greed propel us into believing almost anything.

Just as flowers will inevitably wilt, so human greed if gone unchecked, will ultimately lead to our downfall.