{"id":5046,"date":"2015-03-08T16:23:35","date_gmt":"2015-03-08T16:23:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=5046"},"modified":"2015-03-08T16:23:35","modified_gmt":"2015-03-08T16:23:35","slug":"still-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=5046","title":{"rendered":"Still Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

Here’s the start of what Wikipedia <\/a>has to say:<\/p>\n

A still life<\/em> (plural still<\/em> lifes) is a work of art<\/em> 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).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The whole article is worth reading, and the Wikipedia MediaViewer<\/a> shows images of some great examples, none of which is a photograph, though the last example is a computer generated image.<\/p>\n

More often I’ve photographed inanimate objects as objets trouv\u00e9s,<\/em> and perhaps an important point that the definition above omits is the element of arrangement in creating still life compositions.\u00a0 So looking at the Pencil of Nature,\u00a0 Talbot’s image of a fruit bowl
\n<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"Licenced
\nArticles of China” by William Fox Talbot – The Pencil of Nature, 1844.<\/small><\/p>\n

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<\/a>. Of course many other photographers produced some fine still lifes, including Edward Weston (and many of his nudes were more still life than nude.)<\/p>\n

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<\/a> , by Vice photo editor Matthew Leifheit, <\/em>which includes illustrations by another phtoographer whose work in the genre I’ve also long admired, particularly for her colour work, Jan Groover<\/a>. Again, Google Images<\/a> is a good place to see a large selection of her work.<\/p>\n

As Leifheit writes “any 13-year-old with a camera flash can throw some pineapples onto a brightly-colored backdrop and call it art.<\/em> ” 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading Still Life<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photo-issues","category-photographers"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5046"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5049,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5046\/revisions\/5049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}