Between Art and Commerce: The Still Life Photograph
David Campany’s lecture - 12.10.2018
Still Life Photograph can be about expressing idea about taste or belief with the use of different objects related to what we are trying to communicate. If we look carefully at images, we should be able to see links between life and object.
The pioneers of photography such as Niepce, Fox Talbot or Daguerre experimented with still life. Those early photographs can give away details about each photographers’ life. For example, on Talbot’s image below we can see a still life of fruits including a pineapple which would have been quite expensive at the time, not something that everyone could afford which shows that Fox Talbot was quite wealthy. When on the other hand on Niepce’s photo, we can see a simple table laid for one, indicating us that he might had not have lots of money.
W. H. Talbot Fox, A Fruit Piece, Plate XXIV from The Pencil of Nature, 1844-46 Joseph Nicephore Niepce, La Table Servie (The Set Table), 1832.
Many painters also experimented with still life, it was seen as a way to show of your skills.
Advertising is one of the field where still life is often represented. The better the product is presented, the higher the chances to sell it and make a profit out of it are. It makes us desire the advertised object.
Man Ray also practise still life for commercial purpose but keeping this abstraction he is so famous for.
Anastasia Samoylova also photographs still life but in a different way, she prints multiple similar images of the same subject then fold and photographs them display in different way.
Man Ray, Untitled, 1931 Anastasia Samoylova, Lightings, Landscape Sublime, 2014
Photographing every day moment such as a meal can also be consider as part of the genre. Stephen Shore showed it on his photograph Trail’s End Restaurant from his project called Uncommon Places.
Stephen Shore, Trail’s End Restaurant (10 August, 1973), Kanab, Utah, USA