Still lifes

[Chris Jones]

May I start a still life thread?

While researching still lifes I came across a short article on photographic still life which basically said to keep it simple, three or four linked objects. While this is incorrect advice, given the history of still life, it seemed to me this completely avoided what a still life is.

Still life is a complex assembly. It is a type of clutter that draws the eye in for a closer look. In this I am, of course, looking toward painting which invented the genre. Perhaps easier to do in monochrome? This really suits a monorail large format approach for the intimate detail and also the perspective distortions which make the still life look as if it is going to fall over, or off the table or out of the frame, as do the 17th century paintings. I am playing with still life photos as a history of painting so thought it would be fun to see what others have to show.

Here's one recent attempt.

[soeren]

But we allready have such a thread.
"Post your stilllifes" IIRC
Actually its this one
http://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?t=41859&highlight=lifes
Best regards

[r.e.]

I think that he is trying to start a discussion about the aesthetics and techniques of still life photography and the relationship to still life painting. This discussion just might go beyond a notation of camera make, lens and film stock, followed by somebody saying "Great shot!"

Chris, did you have a particular school, artist or painting in mind when you made that?

[Sven Schroder]

Hi

A classic book "Looking at the Overlooked - Four Essays on Still Life Painting by Norman Bryson" helps focus ideas, so its time I re-read it.

Regards
Sven

[Jay Decker]

Subscribed.

Gentlemen, please carry on, I would like to learn about still life photography!

[soeren]

I think that he is trying to start a discussion about the aesthetics and techniques of still life photography and the relationship to still life painting. This discussion just might go beyond a notation of camera make, lens and film stock, followed by somebody saying "Great shot!"

Chris, did you have a particular school, artist or painting in mind when you made that?

Ok Ofcource thats something different. Seems I have lost the ability to read :rolleyes:

[Chris Jones]

Thanks for the replies. Although I am not yet clear on what I am thinking about and did consider the still life thread, on thinking what to write it did seem more polite and democratic to start a new thread since I was interested in the aesthetics of still life painting and photography. Photography is perhaps different to other art media in that it also covers commercial and advertising as well as hobbyists which other mediums don't have in the same way. All this does seem to me to enrich photography, even if art photography does not need this. I think there may be a very interesting dialogue happening here. Especially since recently hobbyists have access to large format monorails, which before digital wasn't the case, unless wealthy.

The history of painting can also impose itself and flood out other ideas, of which I am at least aware, and I was beginning with a history of still life painting. Also, I haven't formally studied or researched still life paintings (except high school art) so it is a new and interesting area for me.

"Looking at the Overlooked - Four Essays on Still Life Painting by Norman Bryson" , I found excerpts of at Google. From a quick look it does seem close to my direction, which is from among the first or second round of Australian cultural studies and media arts. So I can get an appreciation of still lifes as a minor art, from the history I can put together on the Internet.

The attached JPEG I first posted began with 17th Century Dutch still lifes, which I am marking as the beginning of still life painting and jumps to Cezzane's still lifes which use the motifs from the Dutch paintings. Haven't got to a closer fresh look at Cubism, yet. But what seems to happen in this series of still lifes I am playing with is that it begins as a history of still life painting which as it turns out looks nothing like the history of painting. I began by putting together a still life which picks up on some of the motifs such as folded drapery, and elements which looked as if they were falling off the table and the strange perspective which gave still lifes a lively dynamics. The literal translation of still lifes is actually dead nature. So it is anything but still and has a very obvious rhythm in the compositions which also use the golden section which itself goes off to infinity in both directions, infinitely large and infinitely small. Here we also come across a later sublime theme of the large and small, such as Romantic landscape painting. This led me to think of some of Ansel Adam's landscapes as having a Romantic landscape aesthetics. I don't know what to make of this as Adams has a rather devious sense of humour. (Adams called Mortensen the Anti-Christ. Was this a reference to Nietzsche?)

Anyway, what appears to pan out is a trip through the history of painting, done as set up photos, which clears away what may lie in the path of photography as an art medium since what we end up getting is nothing like painting. I was taught (at art school) to begin with the print, but it is a mistake to think this a blank sheet of paper. So we were taught through a series of steps from photogram to pin hole to 35mm camera. This creates a clear enough space for photography to begin.

Anyway, that seems as much as I write for now. Worried it may not be enough to show my hand, as the saying goes. Best wishes, Chris Jones.

[sun of sand]

I miss the pictures

[Chris Jones]

This was one of the first along the Baroque still life line. It took me fives days to put together between other tasks, of course.

[Chris Jones]

Just to pass along some thanks and also by way of my own comments for suggesting:

Looking at the Overlooked - Four Essays on Still Life Painting by Norman
Bryson

Interesting because he makes a connection between Bakhtin's "Rabelais
and His World" and still life painting as the lower bodily functions.

I make a connection with still life photography and Bakhtin's Dialogic
imagination and like Bryson, still life and lyric poetry. I seem to have
stumbled over something of interest here where still life connects to
novels and lyric verse? Unlike Bryson I say still life painting begins
with 17th century Dutch baroque rather then Roman Xenia.

Like myself Bryson sees still lifes as a minor art in painting.

The connection with lyric poetry I may need to tease out more but it does show that photography, at least as an art, can be approached just as much from the direction of literature as painting. There may be some connections with visual poetry, as well?

If there is any interest I could add more later. Flat out in my studio at the moment. best wishes, Chris Jones.

[Chris Jones]

While I am at it I could send another still life in the series. This one looks like a keeper for now???

[Struan Gray]

The connection with lyric poetry I may need to tease out more but it does show that photography, at least as an art, can be approached just as much from the direction of literature as painting. There may be some connections with visual poetry, as well?

This is well worth a read, and expresses much of what I feel about my own landscape work:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n21/jonathan-raban/summer-with-empson

The extension to still lives is an exercise left to the reader :-)

I am starting to muse on the link between symbolism and cliché. Is is possible to find or discover an effective visual metaphor that doesn't immediately get done to death? I'm thinking no.

[cjbroadbent]

... I am starting to muse on the link between symbolism and cliché ...
Symbols are an easy instrument for verbal communication about images. They crop up frequently where images are planned and budgeted by committee (atmosphere and mood are hard to describe in a pre-production meeting).
But photography can't do symbols. Even in black & white, it lacks the abstraction of other media. A dove is just a bird, a shell is a shell and that's that.
In charcoal, a dove is read as 'Peace'. A shell in oil painting is (or once was) read as voluptuousness. I would suggest that a photographer who uses symbols unattached to propaganda runs the risk of ridicule. The subtle language of signs and symbols has been lost for ages.
With the the blunt instrument that is photography, the most we can do is to suggest something outside the frame.
Structure, light and the hint of an idea are the tools we have - and that is plenty enough to contend with.

[theBDT]

Would Edward Weston's Pepper #30 be a still life? It is just one element plus background...

[Chris Jones]

Would Edward Weston's Pepper #30 be a still life? It is just one element plus background...

I rather like this question because it doesn't have a yes or no answer, so it can be both yes and no and becomes an ambiguous statement, perhaps. Genre then becomes a question of varying social relations. (I get this idea from MAK Halliday, google to find more.)

With modern art we are no longer able to think or do art as separate categories. I could call myself a cross media poet which works with line verse and photography, or perhaps a multimedia poet.

The work of Peter Ciccariello, a cross genre poet interests me greatly because of this break down of categories.
http://invisiblenotes.blogspot.com/

[Chris Jones]

Is is possible to find or discover an effective visual metaphor that doesn't immediately get done to death? I'm thinking no.

Some of the still lifes I am working deal with cliche and use cliche so I was delighted by this comment. Also, I am working toward landscape, as well.

I agree that visual metaphors are cliche but I suspect this may be the problem of what a metaphor is as a representation which repeats itself endlessly, it may seem, and floods over a pure novel presence. So how to solve this problem? I can think of two ways, one goes away from cliche and figure toward abstraction and the second goes toward figure and even appropriates cliche into the composition.

There is a type of writing here in Australia, ficto-criticism that uses cliche as a strategy to critically break the assumptions which rest on cliche which I find useful for ideas and suggestions.

www.textjournal.com.au/april05/gibbs.htm


Bakhtin's suggestion on dialogic discourse in the novel, novel meaning writing something that is new, as a dialogue of different languages inside the sentences in novels, may work. EG language of science, language of law and street language in a single sentence. This could be one way to go, it seems to me. A dialogue of cliche leads to collapse of cliche into the work revealing a pure presence beyond cliche...? Moving from an optical vision to a haptic vision is another strategy I am thinking about.

Anyways, no need to follow what I am trying to say. Other ideas welcomed, Chris Jones.

[Chris Jones]

These URLs which link to still life images by William Yang, an important Australian photographer and performance artist, may be of interest to others then myself.

http://www.stillsgallery.com.au/artists/yang/index.php?obj_id=folio&image=20&nav=1

http://www.stillsgallery.com.au/artists/yang/index.php?obj_id=folio&image=21&nav=1

The Stills gallery is worth a browse, BTW.

[Chris Strobel]

Ok I'm in.Sunflower Calumet C-1, 300mm, Fp4+, PMK

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3465/3839083562_fd3ce9313e_o.jpg

[Robert Fisher]

Wow!!!

This deserves to be printed BIG and displayed in a prominent location.

Congratulations Chris!

[Chris Strobel]

Thanks Robert!

[kev curry]

Thats quite a leap... still life to gay porn, fascinating:rolleyes:

[Struan Gray]

But photography can't do symbols. Even in black & white, it lacks the abstraction of other media. A dove is just a bird, a shell is a shell and that's that.

I agree with most of what you say, but I can't go along with this. The attached Paul Caponigro photograph is a canonical refutation. Abelardo Morell's wonderfully observed casual still lifes work for me too.

I agree that one problem is to get viewers to take photography seriously enough to consider the possibility that there is more than meets the eye. Among serious art consumers that battle was won long ago, but among 'ordinary' people there is still a need for hand-holding, or the sense of authority that comes from a gallery or museum.

I also agree that paintings and photographs speak with different voices. Cartier Bresson's best work would be unbearably kitschy as paintings. Photographs which mimic medieval or C16th portraits, with the subject surrounded by directly interpretable objects, often come off as unnecessarily forced, even if you choose symbols modern people will recognise.

I think we are in a historic low point for symbolism in the arts generally. How you interpret that fact, and how you might try and break away from it, are questions of taste, but I don't feel that lack to be an inherent trait of the medium of photography. There is a lot of 'discourse' with symbols in recent art, but it is mostly of the childish play-with-a-word-until-it-loses-all-meaning sort. It would be good to find a way of using symbols that recognises their power in a sincere way, but without simply copying historical models.

Chris, my comment was inspired by the way that today's successful metaphors 'go viral', and are so quickly diluted by casual and commercial overuse. What I think of as conscious metaphors, the equivalent of symbolism in plays and poems in the pre-visual age, are manufactured and repackaged so quickly that they don't have time to gather meaning by organic or unconscious processes.

Photography is part of that repackaging, re-seller driven process, but it also can act against it. My daughter found herself fighting popular culture's vision of girlhood from the age of two onwards, so projects like JeongMee Yoon's Pink and Blue project (http://www.jeongmeeyoon.com/aw_pinkblue.htm) resonate strongly. I also think that photographers are particularly good at discovering those rare instances of organically-grown metaphor hiding in plain sight. Stephen Gill's photographs of hotel toilet paper are an acute observation of an irrational phenomenon that seemed to come from nowhere but which is now ubiquitous (they're buried in a flash presentation at stephengill.co.uk (http://stephengill.co.uk)) His other work, particularly Hackney Flowers, also looks at metaphor in the modern world, although there is a particularly English feel to the whole that might not appeal to the international audience here. Banksy's games with surveillance cameras are a more populist version of the same thing.

Good luck with your series Chris. Show us the results...

[csant]

Photographs which mimic medieval or C16th portraits, with the subject surrounded by directly interpretable objects, often come off as unnecessarily forced, even if you choose symbols modern people will recognise.

The again, I think of Sugimoto's Henry VIII, or Sudek's exercises on Caravaggio. It can work nicely when it is a stylistic exercise - and by that I do not intend diminishing the (artistic) value of the photograph.

[mandoman7]

I would say, stop and think of your audience.

[S. Preston Jones]

Chris Strobel, can you tell us more about how you took this picture, the sharpness over the whole flower with a 300 MM lens on (4x5?) is outstanding. Love the image.

Preston

[Chris Strobel]

Chris Strobel, can you tell us more about how you took this picture, the sharpness over the whole flower with a 300 MM lens on (4x5?) is outstanding. Love the image.

Preston

Hi Preston, thanks!The C-1 is and 8x10 camera.Its pretty simple really, its just a tight crop on a whole bushel of sunflowers shot about 5 feet away at I believe about f/45.This is the only scan I can find right now of the neg, its not the scan I used for the crop, but its the same neg.

C

http://www.pbase.com/cloudswimmer/image/94669192.jpg