What is a still life?

[Paul Kierstead]

A Rachel de Joode still life may be a work of art but her art is strongest as installation not photography.

I'll definitely give you that one. As soon as I seen her work, I had a fairly strong urge to see it as an installation (to be fair, I am a fair fan of modern art of that sort); I got the feeling it would look even better "live". I do quite like Brian K's photographs as well, but in spite of them both being "still life", I'd really consider them to different genres. I suppose we could almost label hers as more documentary. Something for me to contemplate.

[Struan Gray]

The biggest complaint I have is the lack of ANY redeeming content. She is just throwing a bunch of unrelated crap on a background. A trained monkey could have chosen and arranged the elements the way she did. There is no story, there is no point.

You've raised the furies and brought down the wrath of the silent majority of lurking pomos on your head, but if you're still reading, here is why I think you are mistaken, or at least why what you give as your central complaint does not match my experience.

Do you have kids, or close family with kids? They have so much stuff. I snigger when I think of that wonderful Lartigue photograph of all his toy cars. If you laid all my three's toy cars out together you'd fill an aircraft hanger, and that's not including the ones they build themselves out of cardboard, Lego or scrap wood. The teenagers I know have the most amazingly eclectic piles of stuff on their bookshelves and dressers, and it gets worse when you set up your first home and everybody helpfully gives you egg-cookers and other one-task household gadgets you don't really need.

I'm not complaining (well, a bit), it is a sign of the material wealth of our society that my kids schoolfriends turn up to parties with presents my parents had to save up for when I was the same age. But it is a new social phenomenon, and as such is worth the notice of art.

Some photographers take an editorial approach. Jongmee Yoon's (www.jeongmeeyoon.com) Pink and Blue project is a nice take on the phenomenon among smaller children, but I don't know of many addressing the same thing among teenagers and young adults, with the possible exception of Lauren Greenfield's work among teenage girls.

De Joode has chosen to use still life, which makes a lot of sense if you are going to look at the psychology of possessions, of how it feels to own things and whether they convey status or not. The link between the apparently unrelated sets of objects is herself, and her life as a young woman growing up in a slightly odd household. True, she has a bit of a thing for random slices of toast, but if you look at any young adult's possessions you find similar agglomerations of stuff, most of which looks random but all of which has an individual back story. In a sense she is data mining the flotsam of her life, trying to see what patterns exist in the things that she has ended up owning. The effect to me is slightly graduation-show clever and look-at-me-look-at-me, but I've seen far worse, and less interesting too.

I know that what I have written can be brushed aside as long-winded special pleading, but it's a careful verbal version of what I felt at once when viewing the photographs. I can see why you feel the way you do, and why still life in particular is important to you, but your dismissal of de Joode's work out of hand strikes me as unjust and flippant. It's a bit like complaining that The Diary of Anne Frank is rubbish because it isn't written in Miltonic blank verse, or that "Girls don't wanna have fun" is a useless song because it isn't in sonata form.