I suppose like most photographers I’ve occasionally taken what might be labelled a ‘still life’ but it has never been a genre that has held my interest in photography. Some I’ve done because people have asked me for a particular purpose, like recording the flowers that my wife has been sent or a birthday cake she made, though these are perhaps not truly still life.
Here’s the start of what Wikipedia has to say:
A still life (plural still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, or shells) or man-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes, and so on).
The whole article is worth reading, and the Wikipedia MediaViewer shows images of some great examples, none of which is a photograph, though the last example is a computer generated image.
More often I’ve photographed inanimate objects as objets trouvés, and perhaps an important point that the definition above omits is the element of arrangement in creating still life compositions. So looking at the Pencil of Nature, Talbot’s image of a fruit bowl
to my mind qualifies as a still life (if perhaps a rather poor one) while other images including ‘A Scene in a Library’ and ‘Articles of China’ are not, as although the photographer has carefully framed the pictures he has not (or not effectively) arranged the objects for the purpose of the photograph.
Articles of China” by William Fox Talbot – The Pencil of Nature, 1844.
There have been relatively few photographers who have made still life images that I find of much interest. Perhaps the best of these was Josef Sudek, who produced some truly fine examples. Of course many other photographers produced some fine still lifes, including Edward Weston (and many of his nudes were more still life than nude.)
What sent me thinking about this, and almost made me miss a train starting to write about it on Saturday morning, was a Facebook post about an article in Vice magazine, No More Lazy Still-Life Photography, Please , by Vice photo editor Matthew Leifheit, which includes illustrations by another phtoographer whose work in the genre I’ve also long admired, particularly for her colour work, Jan Groover. Again, Google Images is a good place to see a large selection of her work.
As Leifheit writes “any 13-year-old with a camera flash can throw some pineapples onto a brightly-colored backdrop and call it art. ” But making a really satisfying still life with a camera is I think something rather more difficult. Perhaps even more difficult than doing it with a paintbrush.