What is Tableaux Vivant?

Image result for caravaggio re-enacted — Student re-enactment after Caravaggio (The Beheading of St John the Baptist) 1608

A tableau vivant (often shortened to tableau, plural: tableaux vivants), French for ‘living picture’, is a static scene containing one or more actors or models. They are stationary and silent, usually in costume, carefully posed, with props and/or scenery, and may be theatrically lit.

Tableau Ideas and Starting points

re-create or re-enact an existing story-based photograph or painting
You could …illustrate a poem, story, song lyrics, fable, moral, mythology, legend, dream or historical event
You could portray…one or more of The Ten Commandments
You could elaborate on…one or more of The Seven Deadly Sins

Tableau Photography is staged. Think of it like theatre.

Tableau Photography is dependent on a defined NARRATIVE, theme or storyline

Blog Post 1 / TASK 1 .(extend and complete for homework)

Define and present examples of Tableau Vivants
You must develop and PLAN a story / part of a story that involves at least 1 x character
You must bse your idea on careful planning and RESEARCH — look at other artists for influence.
You could / should explore gender roles, masculinity, forms of social commentary, sexism, feminism, equality, isolation, belonging, alienation, disenchantment, political agendas, hierarchies, power, status, imperialism, bullying, environmental concerns etc
Include props, backgrounds, costumes and outfits and mise en scene that connects to your theme somehow.
Try to introduce symbolism and metaphor in your image(s) and produce a series of images (like stills from a film)
You may want use the lighting studio…or experiment with suitable locations (connect the location to the theme / storyline)

Final Outcomes : a choice of

3-5 photographs that clearly show your understanding of TABLEAU and STAGED REALITY
Either a group approach – or individual

Blog Post 2 / TASK 2 (minimum 1 x blog post)

Choose a Tableau photographer to research from the examples below
Analyse, interpret and evaluate a key image by your chosen artist : A CASE STUDY
Demonstrate creative links to your own idea

COMPLETE TABLEAU UNIT BY FRIDAY 20th DECEMBER

Example 1 :

DiCorcia’s working methodology:

Dicorcia’s work is a mixture of documentary and staged tableaux for which he is best known
Well known for his use of lighting in street photography
While shooting Hustlers, he paid his subjects, causing controversy in the photographic community
DiCorcia only plans / stages his photographs up to a point and then relies on something unexpected to happen
He does digitally manipulate some of his images by removing or adding items
He does not direct people
Very often he does not know his subjects
He usually has his camera on a tripod
Sets his photos up so that the viewer can assert his/her own interpretation to the image – open narrative

DiCorcia has no patience for visual passivity. “I’ve been trying to create photographs in which the emotional and psychological content is time-released… From the very beginning, I was fighting against this media-created idea that imagery is so disposable that it’s exhausted within a very short amount of time.” His tendency is to slow time down, an apprehension that has nothing to do with entropy. Instead, it is a seduction into the act of looking.

Example 2 :

He uses a large format camera and tripod
He uses polaroids for planning out his scenes
Draws inspiration from iconic Victorian paintings and recreates the scenes in a contemporary setting
Infuses the mood of the Victorian paintings into his modern industrial settings
His work is socially aware and pays tribute to art history
He uses well known art motifs in his work, e.g. the window as in Vermeer’s paintings
His portraiture pays tribute to the Dutch Renaissance and pre-Raphaelite master painters
He simulates similar colours and tones as those used by Vermeer
His portraits are of the disenfranchised people living close to the margins of society
His work is a blend of fictional and factual
He most often replicates Vermeer’s methods of portraiture:

… amongst the art historical references glimpsed within Hunter’s oeuvre, the voyeurism of Vermeer is most discernible. Subjects are often shown full figure, in private spheres (e.g. sites of domesticity), and set in the mid-ground in order to include something of their environment.

Example 3 :

Gregory Crewsdon talks about ‘the real and the imagined’. He works around concepts of place / setting; character; narrative. He is also very clear about the technical aspects of his work, particularly lighting and mise-en-scene, ie the arrangements of objects in his frame. He is a storyteller, using photography to catch a frozen moment in time, that both suggests the back-story (what happened before this frozen moment) and the story that may unfold. It is about ‘bringing the viewer in’. As he says, ‘there are no answers in these pictures, only questions.’