Bj Dyer and Guenther Vogt at the Denver DCPA after creating a beautiful evening

A photo shoot can be the start of a friendship. A decade ago, a national trade magazine called me to do a cover shot of BJ Dyer and Guenther Vogt to recognize them for the award-winning branding of Bouquets, a floral business. We ended up living and locating my studio a block from their LoDo store. It’s the best place to find flowers, an unusual plant, a gift or the perfect prop. It was a pleasure for me to give back to the community while photographing the beautiful atmosphere they created.

In The Denver Post, from Joanne Davidson who wrote an encapsulation of Guenther Vogt’s life:

“Guenther Vogt was born June 24, 1947, in Brooklyn, N.Y., to immigrant parents who met in a German ghetto in Brooklyn after his father placed a “man seeks woman” ad in a neighborhood German-language newspaper. Vogt and his siblings didn’t speak English until they started school; subsequently, they taught it to their parents.”

“After obtaining a degree in landscape architecture from Syracuse University, Vogt moved West — first to Berkeley for graduate studies in environmental planning at the University of California, and then to Colorado to learn Farsi while training for Peace Corps service in Iran.”

“The expertise he developed as a Peace Corps volunteer qualified him to later be hired by the Shah of Iran to be a member of a team that researched, outlined and developed a master environmental plan for Iran.”

“Vogt returned to Denver, where the team liaison had offices, to spend six months writing a book that documented the project. He met Dyer, then a freshman at the University of Denver, during that time and when Vogt’s work on the book was done, he opted to remain in Denver and start a landscape design/build firm, rather than break off their relationship.”

Guenther died Dec. 23, 2013. He was 66. He and BJ shared decades together.