Is a genre of photography used for the depiction of inanimate subject matter, typically a small group of objects. Similar to still life painting, it is the application of photography to the still life artistic style.

History of Still Life

-Still life is usually about metaphors / symbolism (i.e death, love, fragility of life, etc)

Still, life has historically been used as a way to present symbolism for real life, for example early Netherlandish paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries often contained religious and allegorical symbolism relating to the objects depicted. This then developed to more recent history with photography- allowing more to be captured more easily. This genre gives the photographer more leeway in the arrangement of design elements within a composition compared to other photographic genres, such as landscape or portrait photography. Lighting and framing are important aspects of still life photography composition. Manmade objects like pots, vases, consumer products, handicrafts etc. or natural objects like plants, fruits, vegetables, food, rocks, shells etc. can be taken as subjects for still life photography. Typically, still life photos are not close up to the subject nor far away, but at a very head-on angle. The art in still life photography is often in the choice of objects that are being arranged and the lighting rather than the skill of the photographer. Still life derives from the Dutch word still even, coined in the 17th century when paintings of objects enjoyed immense popularity throughout Europe. The impetus for this term came as artists created compositions of greater complexity, bringing together a wider variety of objects to communicate allegorical meanings.

Analysis of Key Painting

Brueghel has used

Robert Heinecken

Robert Heinecken was an American artist who referred to himself as a “paraphotographer” because he so often made photographic images without a camera. He was born on October 29th 1931 and died on May 19th 2006.

examples of his work

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Heinecken extended photographic processes and materials into lithography, collage, photo-based painting and sculpture, and installation. Drawing on the countless pictures in magazines, books, pornography, television, and even consumer items such as TV dinners, Heinecken used found images to explore the manufacture of daily life by mass media and the relationship between the original and the copy, both in art and in our culture at large.

Image analysis

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This image/sculpture shows a stack of rotating images which create multiple images when aligned in different ways, like a puzzle. the images created by the puzzle are pictures of the human form and can be rearranged to create different forms. This could be suggesting that the human form is just like a puzzle and can be very confusing at times.

Lauren Pascarella

Lauren Pascarella was born in Hollywood, FL in 1984.  She studied at New World School of the Arts in Miami, Florida from 2003 to 2007, majoring in Photography. She is currently working in cross-disciplinary genres, including New Media and digital photographic installations. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. 

examples of her work

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Pascarellas process utilizes photographs of printed and manipulated photographs, “I have the ability to shift perspective”. At times, the flat photographic images behave just as if they had the depth of their real world counterparts. In other instances, they are arrayed in a manner that wouldn’t be possible without shedding a dimension. “When examining my work, the viewer is confronted with an unsettling situation that demands correction. Whether the subject is a single item or a cluster of disjointed objects, the mind will attempt proper placement, but without satisfaction”.

Image analysis

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The image above shows a lot of clutter in the kitchen of the artists house which looks like it is placed very random at first. As the artists states, “When examining my work, the viewer is confronted with an unsettling situation that demands correction”, in this case the unsettling situation being a lot of clutter which the viewer wants to clean up. This idea could be backed up by the photo of the woman in the back of the photo who also looks unsettled or even frustrated. The clutter has been placed this way with a purpose, to create a unique sculpture like image where the viewer wants to correctly place the objects where they belong, but without satisfaction.

The final images from my first shoot in the studio using the objects given, I decided to use this shoot as an opportunity to experiment with lighting and colour.

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