Brief: Produce a series of still life pictures that show traces of life without using people.
I have responded to this brief in two different ways.
The journey of an egg.
The death of flowers
The journey of an egg was inspired by the random finding of an egg in my egg box that still had a feather attached. This set me to thinking about what happens to eggs and how they can be used. Eggs can either hatch, produce chickens and then more eggs (the circle of life) or, more frequently they are eaten. I make a lot of scrambled eggs so decided to make a series of images visualising this. I started to try to make a vernacular series using my camera phone but ran into some practical problems – it is difficult to cook and use a phone safely at the same time and I had limited space and could not get far enough away to get good images. So, I decided to make a more formal series with my camera set up on a tripod. I like the eventual effect but still feel that the subject matter might have fitted better with a snapshot ethos, possibly including some more distance shots of the kitchen as well.
The death of flowers is a very traditional series of still life inspired by both the Dutch masters and the works of Tom Brill, Penny Klepuszewka and Sam Taylor-Wood that I looked at in my research. I have been thinking about change and death a great deal recently. I have always been interested in the way flowers change as they die, some just drop their petals, some dry up and survive long-term, others develop mould. I felt that this series was best matched to a formal approach. The flowers were placed in a plain (old) glass vase against a black background. I took them with a slow exposure, I had considered flash, but did not want the shadows that flash would produce. Once taken I adjusted the effect in Photoshop to deepen the black. This had the secondary effect of increasing the apparent vibrancy of the colours. I am aware that this is an often-done series but found it interesting to do. I also tried making images against an antique screen, but this gave a rather confusing effect. I plan to extend the series by starting with some flowers in bud, then taking images using the same set up every day until they totally collapse or dry up and stop changing.
Learning points:
Different approaches are more suited to different subjects
Consider taking images around the main theme to extend the story
Think about being playful, what would be fun for the viewer to see?
Think about your setup – I had to redo all the flower images as creases in the cloth showed.
Still life takes time – ideally the flower series could be extended over several weeks.
in Living Arrangements has considered the changing social face of out time which leads to many elderly people living alone. She says in her artists statement ‘The home is often regarded as a place of shelter but for some in later life if can decode an island of isolation’ (Penny Klepuszewska, s.d.) . In this series she uses small details, barely visible against a black background to show what might be present in someone’s home. There is a folded blue rug, part of a cooker, remains of a meal on a tray, and, most poignant of all, folded hands on a lace cloth with a pair of glasses. The images are gentle but telling. They describe a visual isolation that is terrifying but unfortunately common. The black emphasises the isolation, the paucity of the images that the elderly are often invisible in our society.
Historically, still life was considered to the lowest ranked genre within art. Up to the 20th century art was often ranked according to its perceived cultural value. This ranking tended to follow the hierarchy developed by Andre Felibien (1619-1695). History (or mythological) paintings ranked highest, followed by portraiture (including self-portraits), genre (scenes showing everyday life), landscape, then still life. Still life was considered lowly because it was ‘devoid of human figures and more demonstrative of artistic skill than imagination and intellect’ (Huntsman, 2016). The images were often small and hung in private spaces rather than on grand public display. However, there have been multiple examples of famous still life paintings over the years ranging from the vanitas images of the early Dutch and Flemish artists to Frida Kahlo’s Viva la Vida, painted in the last year of her life. Still life continues to be a rich subject for exploration today.
In photography, still life images were some of the first explored, simply because they were still, and therefore relatively easy to portray with the long exposures needed. Talbot demonstrated images of vases in The Pencil of Nature and Anna Atkins cyanotypes showed a wide range of botanical specimens. More recently, Mapplethorpe, who is probably better known for his portraiture, produced a stunning series of still life photographs, mainly of flowers, but also of the traditional memento mori object of a skull.
Still life can be used as a formal series without including other genres or mixed with portraits and landscapes to broaden the story. A recent example of this is the work by Øyvind Hjelmen (Hjelman, s.d.)who, in his recent work, Moments Reflected, shows an unexplained cone on a desk, and a lightbulb hanging from a ceiling amongst a series of hazy images of people and animals. He is (according to Laura Serani in his artists statement) telling about the past and the present, memories and dreams. Another example of this mixture of still life, portraits and landscapes is shown in Bed and Breakfast by Susan Lipper .
Still life images can be made from ‘found objects’, used as they are, in their environment, such as in Making Do and Getting By by Richard Wentworth and Dingbats by Chris Wylie (Wiley, s.d.) where he takes images of close-up details seen on buildings and objects and shows them in a formal setting against a vividly patterned frame. He says ‘ the works in this series are concerned, at least in part, with the concept of the ersatz – a descriptor of things that strive to be something other and better than they are, whose existence is defined by being like rather than simply being….Photography is like the real, but is not the real’ (Cotton, 2015).
Other photographers choose to take the objects out of the environment and make elaborate ‘sculptures’ which they then photograph. Sarah Lynch with her carefully balanced objects, suspended with wire and thread and the Laura Letinsky images of left-over things and torn out, repurposed items show this. Another example is the work of Tim Brill (Brill, s.d.) whose Still Life series draws of 17th Century Dutch and Spanish masters. On his website he says, ‘The term Still Life is essentially oxymoronic and in this body of work I look to animate that stillness by removing the quotidian nature of the objects’. He uses fruit and vegetables set against a simple black background on a marginally visible dark surface. Sometimes the items are suspended, sometimes lying on shelves. The colours are intensely vibrant, almost unreal. In a further series Teddy Bear he uses a similar technique and places an old teddy bear with a variety of fruit, broken toys, a skull. He then adds a simple statement is a chalkboard style typeface such as ‘is it time?’ (with the very dilapidated teddy and the skull). He describes this series as exploring the loss of innocence. Tabea Mathern undertook a personal project to produce 52 still life images, one a week for a year. She shows them all on her website (Mathern, s.d.), they vary from collections of found objects to elaborate staged sculptures. All come with the date and an explanation, some long, some just a sentence.
It is clear from this very brief overview that still life images can be used to illustrate all parts of life, from childhood to extreme old age, from dreams to memories. A rapid Google search came up with 4,660,000,000 results and an almost equally massive number of images. Most (at a quick scan) seem to be the classic images of fruit, jugs, silverware and skulls. Many of the colours are luscious, the backgrounds often dark. If I am going to add anything of meaning to this array it needs to be personal, to represent something that I care about, and something that will add extra value to the topic. A big ask, but worth exploring.
Susan Lipper is an American photographer. The majority of her work has involved travelling around America to record the events that can occur in the rural areas, playing on the trope of the documentary travel photography and the cross-country travelling that frequently occurs in American photography. Much of her work has centred around the small area of Grapevine Hollow in the Appalachians, where she initially took a series of images of the houses and the people between 1988 and 1992. The images are black and white, sparse and do not glamorise the area. She clearly had a good relationship with the people although I suspect outsiders are rarely welcome. She returned to Grapevine between 2006 and 2011 to make a further series Off Route 80 (Lipper, s.d.). In contrast these images show the countryside, still in black and white. They remind me of the images by Robert Adams in An Old Forest Road (Adams, 2017). Few show any traces of life other than rough tracks. One shows a motorway (freeway) bridge – presumably the eponymous Route 80. Between the two series she tells the story of a place that is, to an extent, left behind. The cover image for the book Grapevine (Lipper, 1994) shows a deer, hung from a baseball hoop, with cars and a house in the background. Another image shows a smiling girl with her Halloween pumpkin, yet another a snake on a bed. According to O’Hagan (O’Hagan, 2010), while her characters are real, the scenarios may often be staged. It tells about the poverty and the background of alcohol and violence that this both causes and contributes to. There is a tension in the images, anything could happen. In the book Lipper also records some of the conversations she had with the people, a narrative to give depth to the story. When talking about the later images she describes then as ‘Nature viewed as lush and enveloping—almost biblical, a found Eden. However also lawless, scary and threatening.’ (Williams, 2009).
Bed and Breakfast (Lipper and Chandler, 2000) is a very different series, it is in colour, it is much gentler on the surface. The book was made as a commission by Photoworks in response to the George Garland Collection of photographs of rural England. The images seem old fashioned and out of place for the time (1998) and place (West Sussex). Some remind me of B & B’s I have stayed at, the folded towel, the kettle. Others are somewhat disturbing; the picture of the groping hands on the wall, sex scratched on the bathroom door, the terrifying landlady. This is a place I grew up in, a time I have lived though, but I find it surprisingly difficult to recognise. As Chandler notes in his introduction to the book ‘Lipper’s account of West Sussex is a purely subjective one, it is her response to a particular formation of English country life. Others will inevitably see things differently’. I am one of those who remember it differently.
Sarah Lynch is a Scottish photographer who makes still life images by building up small sculptures, wire, fruit, pieces of paper and then photographing them and showing them at large scale. There is one that grabs my attention, a plum with some pieces of thread in a deep damson colour on a white surface with a bubble floating just above the same surface. It contrasts dark and light, solid and ethereal, permanent, and fleeting. Another shows a raspberry on a pile of torn white paper suspended by a string and wire. The images are delicate, appearing simple. Fragile but balanced. The fragments of colour stand out against a predominantly white and grey background.
In the interview in Photoparley (Boothroyd, 2012) she says her goal is to make ‘people stop and pause for a while’, to spend ‘a moment contemplating everyday objects as beautiful and fragile’ and to ‘put our small selves into perspective’. Not a bad goal to aspire to.
Laura Letinsky is a Canadian artist and photographer, who lives and works in Chicago. She is best known for her still life images, mainly using soft pastels colours. Initially she mainly used objects, fruit, china, tables, and napkins but more recently has added in photographs, magazine clippings and similar objects to her oeuvre. The pictures often show the end of things, the leftovers, the crumbs on the table. The images are surprisingly beautiful for all that they show the debris of life. In her interview with Brian Sholis (Sholis, 2013) (quoted in the OCA manual) she talks about her interest in still life as a genre that enables her to explore ‘the tension between the small and minute and larger social structures’. She describes how she uses images ‘already in the world’, including her own. She notes that ‘images are promiscuous……. they don’t care what we do with them’ and that ‘photography can help access the feelings that are intrinsic to being human’. In another interview she says, ‘Instead of inviting the viewer to partake in the traditional still life, I was interested in what remains. What gets left over, what you can’t get rid of, or what you try to hold onto’ and references Barthes’s comments about photography being always after the fact (Herrara, 2017).
In Ill Form and Void (Letinsky and Tillman, 2014) it is often difficult to be sure whether she has photographed real items, or pictures of real items or a mixture. The delicate colours of the images are set against white, cloths nd paper. Much is torn and broken. The colours are smudged. They talk about the small things, the left-over things, the left behind items. It is similar to the series Albeit – however in this case the colours are harsher and the use of torn pictures more obvious. One shows a bird on a branch with an ivory handed knife, the kind of knife I grew up with, and that are still in my mother’s drawers.
Time’s Assignation and Other Polaroids 1997 -2007 (Letinsky and Herschdorfer, 2017) is a series of Polaroids of still life’s. The surfaces are damaged, the colour is washed out. They are blotched and blurred. Some are barely visible. They are beautiful, show the small unimportant things in life. The images were made on Polaroid Type 55 film, now partly decomposed as part of her working process – but have become images in their own right, time worn.
I had only seen the occasional image by her previously but, having looked at it extensively I find myself wanting to acquire it, to hang it on my wall, to be able to stare at it when I am tired. To luxuriate in the colours. To bring back the past.
Sam Taylor-Wood (now Taylor-Johnson) works across photography and film both commercially and within the fine art world. She has directed Nowhere Boy (about John Lennon) and 50 Shades of Grey. Her website (Taylor-Johnson, s.d.) shows a mixture of short film clips and still images. All make use of time, time suspended or sped up. There is an arresting photograph of a dancer in mid leap, set against a languid looking female on a couch –After Van Halen. Another image shows a dancer – Speed – where a slow shutter speed has caught her clothes swirling around her and there is the well know Suspended Self Portrait series with her hanging upside down, seemingly in mid-air, no obvious supports.
She says in short video interview Brief Applause (Brief Applause: Artist Sam Taylor-Wood, 2008) ‘I have ideas and they wouldn’t go away…. they are very photographic, very strong. A lot of my photographs take a lot of organisation and set up. Suspended self portraits are images of me bound and hung from my studio …. there was a lot of pain and constriction …. Yet when you see them…. You sense more freedom than the constriction, …. (it is) frozen in time’.
Still Life (Still Life, 2001) is a short film of fruit in a bowl that shows the fruit decaying over time. It is set to music by Keith Kenniff in a piece called Preservation Devine. In 4 minutes, it shows a bowl of apples, pears and cherries gradually disintegrating. They first shimmer, become surrounded by a blue glow of fungal spores and then collapse. All to the accompaniment of soothing piano music. It is surprising beautiful and relaxing to watch. In another piece A Little Death (A Little Death, 2002) she shows the gradual collapse of a dead hare via the life of insects into the remains of bone and skin. All the while a peach sits alongside, remaining seemingly whole. This time it is set to a short piece of chamber music by Royksopp. This is equally mesmerising although more horrific – I suspect because of the awareness that this was once a living animal.
Both of these pieces are related to the painters frequently chosen objects for still life, fruit, game, death and decay, carefully posed and translated into film. In an interview with Wendt (Wendt, 2019) Taylor-Wood says ‘A still life is still a still life, even in the transformation from painting to film. I am interested in ideas connected to mortality and the passage of time, as were the Dutch master painters’ . The films make use of time passing and alteration in states of being to tell a very carefully composed story. They talk about life and death, now and then, time and standing still. The whole world in a compressed space.
In Chapter 4 from Charlotte Cottons book The Photograph as Contemporary Art (Cotton, 2014) she discusses the art of making images from the ordinary things in life – something and nothing.
Non-human things – often ordinary and every day – can, when photographed, become more important. This is particularly noted when colour is intensified, scale is changed, or the environment is changed. This can be used for almost any item you can imagine; they could be concrete items such as traditional still life or ephemeral things such as snow and light.
What do you make of these types of images is what you will/ can. The practitioner/photographer has has decided that the item is important simply by photographing it. The images may be unglamorous such as in the Quiet Afternoon series by Fischer and Weiss. They may question the status of art by picturing an activity demonstrated in Gabriel Orozco’s work Breath on a Piano. Photographs made from unusual found items can suggest stories to the viewer about what might be happening. The interpretation is up to your imagination. Nigel Shafran uses things found in daily life, such as his washing up, photographed in ambient light which tells us about the importance of the ordinary.
Images taken in series can make a commentary on culture. Architectural spaces may be used in a similar way and for this people often use deserted and partly destroyed buildings together with items that have been left behind by previous tenants. In James Welling’s work he repeatedly photographs items from slightly different angles or with slight changes implying that know something you need to look at it in multiple ways.
Still life, especially of items within the house or home, may demonstrate the considerable frailty of life. This was frequently a topic with the Dutch still life painters and they often used memento mori within their painting. It can be used to show how life changes, things falling apart, the end of eras.The idea of behind these possibilities is the use of an everyday, ordinary or unexpected object to make us think about what we are seeing and interpret it in a different way. It can be very useful if you are wanting to talk about things that are not traditionally easy to photograph or that might cause distress if handled too directly such as death, freedom, loss or change. Metaphors also have limitations in that they may not be understood without knowledge of the specific referents used or an explanatory text – which might then close down the possible interpretations. The viewers of the Dutch Old Masters were usually people who were visually literate and would have subconsciously understood the inclusion of a skull or a cross. Metaphors also are usually limited by culture. An extreme example of this might be some graffiti on a wall, which could be seen as vandalism by one person, a gang affiliation by a group of people or simply as ‘I was here’. Colour is another example of this. In Britain white is usually used to represent purity, virginity, clarity, and peace and is often used for wedding dresses, while in India, Hindu populations would traditionally use red as it indicates spirituality, protection and commitment while white is commonly worn to funerals as it symbolises purity, and it is used to show respect to the departed.
Summary:
Still life, in the broadest sense, can be used as a metaphor
Metaphors can be useful if you are describing a profound or troubling subject
Metaphors need to be used with care as not everyone will understand them, and text may need to be added
The use of unexpected conjugations of items especially with unexplained settings can make people think / invent their own stories.
Reference:
Cotton, C. (2014) The Photograph as Contemporary Art. (Third edition) New York, New York: Thames & Hudson.
Karen Bullock is a young documentary photographer from Alabama, USA. She has produced a body of work called Presence Obscured (George, 2020) which explores the changing nature of Christianity and faith in the south of America, and her own experiences within that setting. She says ‘Through these photographs, I share what I perceive as an ethereal sense of presence alongside themes of longing and loss. They are an open-ended offering to the viewer to ponder experiences of faith which sometimes arise in our lives, especially in the midst of trauma or crises such as the world is enduring now.’ Bullock made the images to after a severe personal difficulty and found that they helped her to cope.
The images show buildings, old churches (inside and out), abandoned statues, and religious icons. There are no people, just the traces left behind. It asks is faith still active, or has it long gone? Where is it now in people’s lives? The colours are vibrant even though the subject is occasionally sad. The lack of people is poignant. It asks another question – if she went back tomorrow would there be someone there – or not?
Bullock’s use of absence lends strength to the work. It talks about the forgotten things, the things that may, or may not, have lost importance. People would dilute the message. It tells me about a life that is strange to me – I live in the cold and austere north. The colours are different. The story is similar.
Elliott Wilcox is primarily a fashion and sports person portrait photographer, working for some of the big names, Converse, Nike, Urban Outfitters. In his website (Elliott Wilcox, s.d.) the first thing you see is people, people standing, people jumping, people in your face. Saturated colours. Moody glances. However, as you work down the page, past all the glitter and the glamour, you come across three very different pieces of work. More personal, although absent of people.
Courts is a series of images of sports courts. They are hyper saturated with colour, while remaining quiet and reflective. The walls show multiple marks were the ball (and bodies) have hit. The energy of the players has been transmuted into these tiny marks.
Walls shows climbing walls, or rather the close-up details that you would probably only usually see if you were close up and personal with them, hanging on. If you saw one of the images out of context mots people would not know what they were. They are abstract patterns, areas of light and shade. But with the minimal context given by the title they make sense. I can imagine (with terror) balancing on a point, clinging to the surface. The sheer strength required to do so.
There is a third piece Inhalers where he pictures the inhalers used to treat asthma, enlarged and isolated against a blue background, seemingly hanging in mid air. They show traces of life in the dirt and lipstick. They are lifesavers to many people.
The contrast between this work and his commercial work is startling. They use the same techniques, large format, highly coloured images. They tell about the person in their sheer absence of people.
Identity and Place 