The Evolution of Still Life Photography: A Challenge to Traditional Notions

In the world of photography, still life has long been considered a classic genre, featuring objects such as flowers, fruits, and foods that are typically arranged in a deliberate composition. However, photographer Penn's radical departure from this traditional notion by photographing discarded or trash items in the street challenged the definition of what we consider to be a still life. By doing so, Penn opened up new avenues for creative expression and encouraged artists to question their assumptions about the medium.

Penn's work is often referred to as "trash photography," where he would capture images of discarded items on the street, such as old shoes or broken toys. These photographs not only challenged the traditional notion of still life but also highlighted the beauty in everyday objects that are often overlooked. By finding value in these discarded items, Penn showed that even the most mundane objects can be considered worthy of artistic attention.

The significance of Penn's work lies not only in its challenge to traditional notions of still life but also in its impact on the art world. By pushing boundaries and questioning assumptions, Penn inspired a new generation of photographers to experiment with different genres and mediums. His work also highlighted the importance of creativity and innovation in photography, encouraging artists to think outside the box and explore new ideas.

Other notable photographers who have contributed to the evolution of still life photography include Robert Mapplethorpe, Tom Burrell, and Abelardo Morel. Mapplethorpe's botanical series, which featured images of flowers and plants shot using a pinhole camera, is a prime example of how traditional notions of still life can be subverted to create something new and innovative. Burrell's tabletop settings and architectural work also challenged the traditional notion of still life, while his use of natural light added an element of drama and sophistication to his images.

Morel's series on books and other objects is another example of how still life photography can be used to explore new ideas and challenge traditional notions. His use of old, dusty books with worn covers and yellowed pages added a sense of nostalgia and antiquity to his images, while his careful composition and lighting created a sense of intimacy and introspection. Morel's work also highlights the importance of concept and idea in photography, encouraging artists to think about the message or theme they want to convey through their images.

Joel Peter Witkin is another photographer who has made significant contributions to the evolution of still life photography. His use of traditional composition and lighting techniques, combined with a sense of shock and awe, created images that were both unsettling and fascinating. Witkin's work also features a strong sense of historical reference, drawing on the artistic traditions of the 16th century past masters. By incorporating elements of old Dutch still life paintings into his photographs, Witkin created a sense of continuity and tradition that was both nostalgic and innovative.

At its core, still life photography is all about control and experimentation. The photographer has complete control over every element of the image, from the composition to the lighting, allowing them to create images that are both deliberate and intuitive. This emphasis on creative freedom and experimentation has made still life photography a unique and powerful medium, capable of exploring new ideas and challenging traditional notions.

The Importance of Lighting in Still Life Photography

Lighting is one of the most critical elements in still life photography, as it can make or break an image. Natural light, artificial light, and naturalized lighting are all options that photographers have at their disposal, each with its own unique advantages and challenges. By experimenting with different lighting techniques, photographers can create images that are both dramatic and sophisticated.

Window light is often used in still life photography, as it provides a soft, gentle glow that can add warmth and depth to an image. Natural outdoor lighting, on the other hand, can be more challenging, but also offers a sense of drama and authenticity that can elevate an image. Artificial light, including flash and other lighting sources, can be used to create bold, striking images that grab the viewer's attention.

Regardless of which type of lighting is chosen, the key is to experiment and find the right combination that works for the image. This requires a careful consideration of the composition, color palette, and overall aesthetic of the photograph. By taking control of the lighting element, photographers can create images that are both visually striking and emotionally resonant.

A New Generation of Still Life Photographers

The evolution of still life photography is not limited to the work of individual artists, but also reflects a broader shift in creative expression and experimentation. As new technologies and mediums emerge, photographers are constantly pushing the boundaries of what is possible and challenging traditional notions of art.

Abelardo Morel's series on money, for example, challenges the idea that still life photography can only be about traditional objects like flowers and fruits. By exploring a seemingly mundane subject like currency, Morel shows how even the most unexpected objects can be used to create thought-provoking images.

Similarly, Joel Peter Witkin's use of shock and awe in his photographs encourages viewers to think critically about the medium. By incorporating elements of old Dutch still life paintings into his work, Witkin creates a sense of continuity and tradition that is both nostalgic and innovative.

The future of still life photography lies in its continued evolution and experimentation. As new technologies and mediums emerge, photographers will continue to push the boundaries of what is possible and challenge traditional notions of art. By embracing creativity and innovation, we can look forward to a rich and diverse range of images that inspire and provoke us.

Conclusion

The evolution of still life photography reflects a broader shift in creative expression and experimentation. From Penn's radical departure from traditional notions of still life to the work of individual artists like Mapplethorpe, Burrell, Morel, and Witkin, we see how the medium has adapted and transformed over time.

At its core, still life photography is all about control and experimentation. The photographer has complete control over every element of the image, from the composition to the lighting, allowing them to create images that are both deliberate and intuitive. By embracing creativity and innovation, we can look forward to a rich and diverse range of images that inspire and provoke us.

In the world of photography, still life is more than just a genre – it's a way of thinking about art and its relationship with the world around us. As we continue to evolve and experiment with this medium, we open ourselves up to new ideas and possibilities that can inspire and challenge us in ways we never thought possible.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enit is time for your next photo assignment so in this video I want to talk about photo Semin number 8 now in the last photo assignment we dealt with motion and we talked about how to represent motion within the context of a still image so for this photo assignment I'm going to do the complete opposite and we're going to be working with still life now a still-life image is an image that is produced of generally in adamant objects and they are simply studies in composition and lighting this is something that became very popular with the painters of the 16th century though you can argue that it goes back further but that's when it really became invoke and so a lot of these past master paintings that you see that are still lifes usually have some kind of table setting filled with fruits and game and breads and that's kind of the typical classical image that we associate with the still life but I want to put this into the context of photography and hopefully give you some examples and some inspiration that will shape the direction of what you want your work to go in so that's what we're going to do in this video photography examples of still life come at the very beginning and I think this is really interesting because you have louis daguerre developing his experiments in France and then you have Fox Talbot also doing the same thing at the same time but with different processes in England Louie de garis typically who we associate with the daguerreotype which was the first type of commercially produced photograph but both of these photographers were very interesting to me because they dealt with still lifes now Louie de Guerre if you look at his early work it resembles the old past master paintings it's similar types of aesthetic similar types of composition it's obviously monochrome because we didn't have color at that point in photography but he harkens back to the past master paintings now where it gets interesting is the work that fox talbot was doing he was doing pictures that were basically shadow pictures they did not require a camera to make and we know these today's photographs but basically by placing an object onto directly onto a sheet of paper you can expose this to light and use chemicals to fix a set image into the paper and so a lot of these early photographs that fox how it was doing I would actually argue they are still lifes and they are very different than what we associate with the classic still life look of the table with the fruits and all that basically these are very minimal and you have basically one maybe two maybe three objects there's things like leaves lace just the most intimate objects that you find and if you ever get a chance to actually see these they have a lot of at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and there's also a museum on the property that fox talbot lived on in Leacock Lacock Abbey where you can actually go see these and the little cameras that he used to produce certain things you know the images I'm talking about a photograph so these are done without a camera but I think these are the earliest example and actually a radical departure in photography from the painting that came before it and of course as you know photography spent years throughout history trying to gain acceptance into the art world into museums and galleries and a certain amount of validity and cred and I think it's really interesting to see fox talbot going against that grain early on but i want to bring this up to the modern era and one of my favorite photographers i've talked a lot about on the show is Irving Penn and Irving Penn was a master of still-life imagery what is interesting about Penn's he had several different approaches that he would use to still lifes he has kind of definitely an influence from the past master paintings but these are in the context of the mid-century 1950s where you have a postmodern aesthetic that's going on he was at the school of alexey ivanovich and what was going on with the magazine that he was working for at that time and so his still life images definitely have a modernist quality to them and I think this is very important to note they also crept into his commercial work which i think is very bold and very daring and not a lot of the very well-known photographers from this period would do this and you know he worked for a magazine so being a photographer was very serious taking everything seriously you see still lives creeping into magazine articles on cooking you see frozen vegetables they're wonderful examples of what he was doing at that time and then what's really interesting is the experimental personal work that Penn was doing in addition to this there's a whole series on cigarette butts and these wonderful macro images that were challenging for him to produce he found a way to do it they're beautifully printed and pens whole approach here is that in the classical sense we normally associate still lives with things that are very beautiful foods a certain kind of place setting and what he did was try to find things that we normally think of as discarded or not before or trash and a lot of times you refer to these trash pictures there are things like another famous one is the found glove or there's another one that's chewing gum on the sidewalk and Penn is radically challenging the definition of what we consider to be a still life normally in the class still-life images are things of flowers botanicals fruits foods things that we consider to be of value and Penn is sitting here photographing garbage in the street and challenging that notion of what a still life can be and I think that's the important significance of what Penn offered to the art world and definitely the world of photography there are other photographers throughout the 20th century who are well known for doing still lifes as well people like Robert Mapplethorpe in his botanical series Robert Mapplethorpe sprinter was Tom Burrell who went on to have a pretty successful career of his own I think he's a fabulous photographer mainly doing tabletop setting stuff although there's some architectural work as well but he really specialized in the still life and a lot of these botanical images that Burrell was doing were done with a pinhole camera so again bringing another element in that you wouldn't expect in the classic photography instance of a still life I think another more modern example of this would be a velour Morel who is another photographer I mentioned quite a bit over the years and Abelardo Morell is fantastic and I think that he comes at it from more of conceptual direction but challenges once again what we can think of as a still life there is a series that he did on books some of these images have kind of dis antiquity kind of aesthetic to them of old dusty books in different sizes just positions various studies but then some of the images also take the actual content of the book for instance Alice in Wonderland cut up the pages and the illustrations and then represent that in a photograph and so I think it's a really interesting way of looking at it you did another series on money again something that you wouldn't associate with the aesthetic of the traditional still life but a way of actually showing you it can be something else and it can move into another direction I think that's really important another photographer just worked a lot with the idea of doing still lifes would be Joel Peter Witkin Joel Peter Witkin x' work is often shocking but I think that's what's interesting about the still life work that he produced first of all you see an enormous throwback to the 16th century past masters not only in the tabletop setting with the fruit but also even in the frame of the images they're not exactly square photographs you have the arch at the top there they harken back to early photography but then you had this element of jairo Gnaeus Bosch that comes in and the shocking disfigured body parts that kind adding grotesqueness to what he was doing with still lives and Joel Peter Witkin definitely is a photographer who goes for the shock and awe but I think this work is definitely significant and definitely worth looking at in that context so that is a brief overview of where still-life has been in photography and obviously there are more examples and we're going to do some more videos on this and actually talk about it I want you guys to remember that at the core of all this and go look at some of this work at the core yes some of it is conceptual particularly when you look at Penn's trash pictures or if you look at Abelardo Morell shooting money or books it gets very conceptual but these in the end are such studies in composition and lighting and it's very simple it's a very Zen thing with you and your camera and what is before you in the composition and you control all of the elements in the composition and so as you start to think about what you want to do I would encourage you to definitely think about the lighting element in this in both natural settings do you want to use window light or natural light maybe outdoor lighting or do you want to use artificial light with flashes and how do you want to design that because that's the cool thing about still-lifes is you have control over every element of the picture you're not working with a human being where you're trying to establish a relationship you're trying to find a decisive moment all that is off the table no pun intended what you're doing is you're trying to find a collection of objects where you can play with that composition in that lighting so if you have any questions or thoughts on any of this please leave me a comment below and as always if you've enjoyed this video please remember to like it share it subscribe to the artifact Rafi for more videos lots of stuff coming up I will see you in the next video until then laterit is time for your next photo assignment so in this video I want to talk about photo Semin number 8 now in the last photo assignment we dealt with motion and we talked about how to represent motion within the context of a still image so for this photo assignment I'm going to do the complete opposite and we're going to be working with still life now a still-life image is an image that is produced of generally in adamant objects and they are simply studies in composition and lighting this is something that became very popular with the painters of the 16th century though you can argue that it goes back further but that's when it really became invoke and so a lot of these past master paintings that you see that are still lifes usually have some kind of table setting filled with fruits and game and breads and that's kind of the typical classical image that we associate with the still life but I want to put this into the context of photography and hopefully give you some examples and some inspiration that will shape the direction of what you want your work to go in so that's what we're going to do in this video photography examples of still life come at the very beginning and I think this is really interesting because you have louis daguerre developing his experiments in France and then you have Fox Talbot also doing the same thing at the same time but with different processes in England Louie de garis typically who we associate with the daguerreotype which was the first type of commercially produced photograph but both of these photographers were very interesting to me because they dealt with still lifes now Louie de Guerre if you look at his early work it resembles the old past master paintings it's similar types of aesthetic similar types of composition it's obviously monochrome because we didn't have color at that point in photography but he harkens back to the past master paintings now where it gets interesting is the work that fox talbot was doing he was doing pictures that were basically shadow pictures they did not require a camera to make and we know these today's photographs but basically by placing an object onto directly onto a sheet of paper you can expose this to light and use chemicals to fix a set image into the paper and so a lot of these early photographs that fox how it was doing I would actually argue they are still lifes and they are very different than what we associate with the classic still life look of the table with the fruits and all that basically these are very minimal and you have basically one maybe two maybe three objects there's things like leaves lace just the most intimate objects that you find and if you ever get a chance to actually see these they have a lot of at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and there's also a museum on the property that fox talbot lived on in Leacock Lacock Abbey where you can actually go see these and the little cameras that he used to produce certain things you know the images I'm talking about a photograph so these are done without a camera but I think these are the earliest example and actually a radical departure in photography from the painting that came before it and of course as you know photography spent years throughout history trying to gain acceptance into the art world into museums and galleries and a certain amount of validity and cred and I think it's really interesting to see fox talbot going against that grain early on but i want to bring this up to the modern era and one of my favorite photographers i've talked a lot about on the show is Irving Penn and Irving Penn was a master of still-life imagery what is interesting about Penn's he had several different approaches that he would use to still lifes he has kind of definitely an influence from the past master paintings but these are in the context of the mid-century 1950s where you have a postmodern aesthetic that's going on he was at the school of alexey ivanovich and what was going on with the magazine that he was working for at that time and so his still life images definitely have a modernist quality to them and I think this is very important to note they also crept into his commercial work which i think is very bold and very daring and not a lot of the very well-known photographers from this period would do this and you know he worked for a magazine so being a photographer was very serious taking everything seriously you see still lives creeping into magazine articles on cooking you see frozen vegetables they're wonderful examples of what he was doing at that time and then what's really interesting is the experimental personal work that Penn was doing in addition to this there's a whole series on cigarette butts and these wonderful macro images that were challenging for him to produce he found a way to do it they're beautifully printed and pens whole approach here is that in the classical sense we normally associate still lives with things that are very beautiful foods a certain kind of place setting and what he did was try to find things that we normally think of as discarded or not before or trash and a lot of times you refer to these trash pictures there are things like another famous one is the found glove or there's another one that's chewing gum on the sidewalk and Penn is radically challenging the definition of what we consider to be a still life normally in the class still-life images are things of flowers botanicals fruits foods things that we consider to be of value and Penn is sitting here photographing garbage in the street and challenging that notion of what a still life can be and I think that's the important significance of what Penn offered to the art world and definitely the world of photography there are other photographers throughout the 20th century who are well known for doing still lifes as well people like Robert Mapplethorpe in his botanical series Robert Mapplethorpe sprinter was Tom Burrell who went on to have a pretty successful career of his own I think he's a fabulous photographer mainly doing tabletop setting stuff although there's some architectural work as well but he really specialized in the still life and a lot of these botanical images that Burrell was doing were done with a pinhole camera so again bringing another element in that you wouldn't expect in the classic photography instance of a still life I think another more modern example of this would be a velour Morel who is another photographer I mentioned quite a bit over the years and Abelardo Morell is fantastic and I think that he comes at it from more of conceptual direction but challenges once again what we can think of as a still life there is a series that he did on books some of these images have kind of dis antiquity kind of aesthetic to them of old dusty books in different sizes just positions various studies but then some of the images also take the actual content of the book for instance Alice in Wonderland cut up the pages and the illustrations and then represent that in a photograph and so I think it's a really interesting way of looking at it you did another series on money again something that you wouldn't associate with the aesthetic of the traditional still life but a way of actually showing you it can be something else and it can move into another direction I think that's really important another photographer just worked a lot with the idea of doing still lifes would be Joel Peter Witkin Joel Peter Witkin x' work is often shocking but I think that's what's interesting about the still life work that he produced first of all you see an enormous throwback to the 16th century past masters not only in the tabletop setting with the fruit but also even in the frame of the images they're not exactly square photographs you have the arch at the top there they harken back to early photography but then you had this element of jairo Gnaeus Bosch that comes in and the shocking disfigured body parts that kind adding grotesqueness to what he was doing with still lives and Joel Peter Witkin definitely is a photographer who goes for the shock and awe but I think this work is definitely significant and definitely worth looking at in that context so that is a brief overview of where still-life has been in photography and obviously there are more examples and we're going to do some more videos on this and actually talk about it I want you guys to remember that at the core of all this and go look at some of this work at the core yes some of it is conceptual particularly when you look at Penn's trash pictures or if you look at Abelardo Morell shooting money or books it gets very conceptual but these in the end are such studies in composition and lighting and it's very simple it's a very Zen thing with you and your camera and what is before you in the composition and you control all of the elements in the composition and so as you start to think about what you want to do I would encourage you to definitely think about the lighting element in this in both natural settings do you want to use window light or natural light maybe outdoor lighting or do you want to use artificial light with flashes and how do you want to design that because that's the cool thing about still-lifes is you have control over every element of the picture you're not working with a human being where you're trying to establish a relationship you're trying to find a decisive moment all that is off the table no pun intended what you're doing is you're trying to find a collection of objects where you can play with that composition in that lighting so if you have any questions or thoughts on any of this please leave me a comment below and as always if you've enjoyed this video please remember to like it share it subscribe to the artifact Rafi for more videos lots of stuff coming up I will see you in the next video until then later\n"