What is a ‘still life’? –
A ‘still life’ comes from the Dutch word ‘stilleven’ which originated during the 17th century throughout Europe. This was when paintings of different complex compositions through a wide variety of objects became of popular and held a greater meaning within them. Still life is further used to depict inanimate objects as there is a large amount of different influences that change the way each painting/picture appears throughout different time periods throughout history.
A brief timeline of Still Life photography –
The first inclusion of still life photography happened during 1927 but was set up for reproduction in 1893, as the original was lost, this image is called ‘The Set Table’ by the inventor Nicephore Niepce.
The picture above is is Niepce’s ‘The Set Table’, this picture represents a table that is covered by a cloth with a meal/cutlery set out for one person. The photo uses a lot of dark shadows throughout on the objects and in the top right corners of the photograph, this can suggest a long exposure time on the camera where there is a lot of light being let in due to this, creating a vast amount of shadows throughout the day. I think that this photo is a good example of what we can label it as a ‘traditional’ still life photo as it has elements in it which represents what still life photography consists of, such as a having a long exposure, using traditional elements to represent wealth/class/etc and how the objects may be set up in a studio or darkroom.
Niepce started to work with Louis Daguerre in 1829 to experiment with different elements of photography, this was where Daguerre was able to create the ‘Daguerreotype’, this was where an image was created on an polished sheet of silver-coated copper. A daguerreotype is a detailed image which has a mirrored surface, making it quite fragile and expensive, this type of photographic process was used to make images such as topographic and documentary photography of a variety of still life images. The use of daguerreotypes developed into ‘Calotypes’ through Henry Talbot, his photographs consisted of household objects (e.g. glassware and books). Therefore, the use of these different types of photographic processes links in to the movement of ‘Realism’ as the camera was used to capture real-life scenes during the 19th century.
As photography moved in the 20th Century, the rise of popularity in Pictorialism photography, which suggested that photographs should resemble art forms. This led to a rise in art photographers such as Baron Adolf de Meyer, Edward Steichen, etc using techniques like soft-focus lenses and working in darkrooms where they would create photos that resemble charcoal drawings, echoing a sense of obscurity and dream photography, still in black and white.
The introduction of colour into still life photography was developed in 1903 but not made available until 1907 by the Lumiere brothers. They developed a technique of using 2 sheets of glass coated with silver emulsion and a combination of potato grains dyed orange, green and violet. By the 1930’s this technique was replaced by a three colour paper based carbo transfer process. By the 1920’s, Paul Outerbridge and a small group of other artists used the dreamlike possessions of pictorialism into their advertising still life art, this was achieved through using different household objects to create a balanced composition. Outerbridge used light in his photographs, he did this through sketching out ideas on paper and then applying this in to the photographic studio. Irving Penn was another artists during the middle of the 20th, he created still life photographs, in black and white and colour, of various objects such as food, skulls, flowers, makeup, etc.
In the 21st century, the rise of still life photos such as Andy Warhol, David Hockney and Roy Lichtenstein. These photographers experimented with the abstraction of still life within modernism, which can be seen a lot in Andy Warhol’s work.
