Still life is a painting or drawing of an arrangement of objects, typically including fruit and flowers and objects contrasting with these in texture, such as bowls and glassware.

In the 17th century lots of paintings representing objects or “still life” began being well-known, usually made for the rich in Europe. These types of paintings were hyper realistic. They included objects which were carefully places and usually told a story, with a hidden meaning behind them, these are called vanitas. They often contained symbols of death and originated as a Dutch genre. this is called memento mori and it means an artistic or symbolic trope acting as a reminder of the inevitability of death. This could be by including skulls or objects that will eventually lose their purpose or “die”, e.g. flowers.

Still life featured prominently in the experiments of photography inventors Jacques-Louis-Mandé Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot. They did this in part, as the exceptionally long exposure times of their processes precluded the use of living models.

there are many photographers who challenge the idea of still life and take on the idea of photographing objects, or foods but adding a slight hint of modernism to their pictures.

Laura focuses on photographing food, or the consumption of food. Her vanitas are much more modern but follow the original style of still life. originally vanitas were photographed in order to tell a story but be attractive. She does the exact same thing, as she places the food/objects carefully in order to create an order of the food that has been eaten. at first glance the photographs don’t seem extraordinary as it is simply a photograph of some foods, but the background, the specific foods, their order and placement, everything challenges the idea of memento mori, where the foods resemble death, the end of the fruits life. These photographs specifically represent beauty in the everyday foods and challenges the viewer to cherish everyday objects especially food as its so crucial to them, to be grateful for it but also to notice or pay attention to tasks like eating, as within minutes a human causes chaos to the food, how a single person can have so much control and how much change they can change when it comes to the food form. She specifically photographs food that has already been consumed to show that the foods beauty is not destroyed it is just in a different shape and form. maybe she aims to do this so the viewer doesn’t feel as bad for eating or maybe she means the opposite, either way what she aims is to portray food in a different form but still make it beautiful.

What I found interesting about her work from others is the pastel like colours and the calmness she aims to capture with her photographs, contrasting with the things she is photographing, almost as if she is trying to say the chaos of the foods is not a chaos at all, all depending how you look at it. Her images are quite bright but not over exposed. She uses light diffused window lighting, where it is usually greyish/white, creating a few light shadows. The whole composition of the photograph is relaxing and pleasing to look at, like I said before, the way she captures the foods is beautiful and calm in contrast with what is going on in the photo. This is because often when photographers photograph disturbed scenery they would edit the picture in the way where it would dramatize this effect, making it dark or saturated, where it would create similar feelings as the object being photographed, however her photographs confuse as they are not edited that way at all .