Still Life, But Not As We Know It

I see a lot of still life images like this in photography magazines, although I'm not entirely sure why.

The white pebbles came from an old electric fire that went to the tip sometime over the summer. The background was provided by my father’s workbench, which is currently sitting in our back garden exposed to the elements, much to my chagrin.

The arrangement was arrived at intuitively, which is to say that I didn't think about it too much, I just pushed the pebbles into some sort of order. I made the image hand held as I’d put my tripod away and couldn't be bothered to get it out again. This wasn't an issue, with the intrinsically slow depth of field helping me out.

All of this is my way of saying that I didn't expend too much effort – from initial idea to captured image took a couple of minutes. I flatter myself that I could print and frame the result and stick it on the wall and no-one would give it a second glance, assuming that it was something that I’d picked up in Ikea or wherever.

Obviously, a lot of the photography that I do involves inanimate objects and would therefore seem to fit the definition of still life, but I would reject that label.

For me, photography is about – amongst other things* - imposing order on the world by the transposition of three dimensions into two and all the associated creative choices that implies. So the key thing here is that it should be the act of photographing that imposes order, rather than order being imposed before the shutter is released.

Someone who selects and arranges a bunch of objects and then photographs them is an interior designer or a flower arranger, not a photographer, in my view. This is one of the reasons why I tend not to photograph cut flowers. Even though many of my images explore the sculptural properties of a single flower or leaf, there is still a fundamental interaction between the spontaneous form occurring in its natural** setting, my creative choices and the apparatus*** used to capture them which meets the criterion set out above.

Now, I am aware that still life has a long and venerable tradition in photography, starting with Fox-Talbot, and of course originates in fine art painting, where it has an even longer and more venerable tradition which I'm not disputing. But in my view there is nothing intrinsically photographic about the discipline, and in the 21^st century, the use of a photographic image to capture a still life seems to me an entirely arbitrary choice, more likely driven by the artist’s inability to paint or draw than the properties of the medium****.

Anyway, next up is my scathing critique of street photography, in which I point out that simply photographing a bunch of random people milling about isn't art, although not getting beaten up and/or arrested in the process is no mean feat in these paranoid times.

*

* One of those other things being the way that, by freezing an instant of time, photography accentuates its passing and thereby the transience of that which is captured – something that flowers are particularly well suited to.

**  Natural, as in cultivated in a garden, which is a definition you may or may not accept, depending on your politics.

*** In the sense used by Flusser, obviously.

**** It certainly is in my case, and it is claimed, in WHFT’s.