A2 30112011

Still Life Photography

A2 Level Photography
30/11/2011


Aim: Understand Still Life photography techniques and
artists.

Learning Objectives

• To be aware of the principles underpinning composition.
• To understand the developments in the still life genre.
• Produce a series of still life photographs inspired from
artist research.


Brainstorm:

Compile a list of Still Life photographers and
identify compositional techniques used.


Still Life images can be just about anything that
doesn't move. The definition of a still life subject is
an inanimate object but other subjects are loosely
termed as still life as well. These include flowers,
food, etc. They are life forms but they don't move.

Source:
http://www.schoolofphotography.com/courses/free-photography-tips-and-articles/19-still-life-photography.html

Composition…

Composition, is a key element often used in still life photography, for
this reason we will highlight a range of compositional rules applied,
these rules are generic and can clearly be used in a wide range of
photography genres.


Identify the compositional technique used

Student task.

•Construct two still life photographs.

•Utilise studio lighting for one image and natural lighting for the second

•Download images and edit in Photoshop

•Consider compositional techniques in your photography.

Complete task and present by 05/12/2011

•Henry Fox
Talbot

•Photograms

•Henry Fox
Talbot

•Immogen
Cunningham

Agave Design 1, 1920s

•Immogen Cunningham

•Starting in the 1920s, she began making sharply focused,
close up studies of plant life and unconventional views of
industrial structures and modern architecture. Concerned
with light, form, and abstract pattern, these photographs
established her as one of the pioneers of modernist
photography on the West Coast.

•Immogen
Cunningham

•Laura Letinsky

The still life genre is unavoidably a commentary on society’s
material-mindedness and the way images promote a kind of promise
of attainability. I am not interested though in the allure of the meal
that awaits an unseen viewer’s consumption. Instead, I photograph
the remains of meals and its refuse so as to investigate the
relationships between ripeness and decay, delicacy and
awkwardness, control and haphazardness, waste and plenitude,
pleasure and sustenance. Throughout my long-term photographic
practice I wish to engage the photograph’s transformative qualities,
changing what is typically overlooked into something splendid in its
resilience. I want to look at what is “after the fact,” at what
(ma)lingers, at what persists, and by inference, at what is gone.

•Laura letinsky

•Edward Weston

•it strikes me that what he actually did, more often than not,
was make the commonplace wondrous and beautiful. In
Weston's still lives, for instance, the tonal quality of his
black-and-white prints imbue everyday objects, both natural
and man-made, with a heightened presence that
sometimes makes them seem almost unreal. In his
journals, he wrote that his aim was to render "the very
substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it
be polished steel or palpitating flesh".

••Sean O'Hagan•guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 18 August 2010 16.49 BST

•Edward Weston

Pepper, 1930 Edward Weston negative,
Cole Weston print

•Edward Weston

•Ori Gherst

Pomegranate, 2006

Using extremely high-speed cameras, Ori Gersht has recreated in the
film ‘Pomegranate’ a Renaissance like still life composition. Whereas
such paintings attempted to preserve motionless moments frozen in
time, Gersht’s compositions are obstructed by fast and violent
intervention. In ‘Pomegranate’, a film that references Juan Sanchez
Cotan’s 17th century still life and Harold Edgerton’s stroboscopic
photography, a high velocity bullet flies across the frame in slow motion
and obliterates a suspended pomegranate, bursts it into open and
wheels it slowly in the air like a smashed violated mouth spraying
seeds. This peaceful image transform into blood shade. In doing so the
film establishes a dialogue between stillness and motion, peace and
violence.

Pomegranite 2006.

Still Life Photography.
•Zachary
Zavislak

•Jonathon
Knowles

•Irving Penn

Cigarette 17 New York, 1972

Cigarette Butts and Sidewalk Debris

•Not surprisingly, he concentrated on producing
photographs intended to be viewed as art. In 1975 the
Museum of Modern Art presented a small exhibition of his
recent work printed using the platinum process: a series of
greatly magnified images of cigarette butts, transformed
from gutter discards to near landmark status, and showing
Mr. Penn’s penchant for straying far from the politesse of his
fashion and portrait pictures. The cigarette butts were
followed by a series focused on other forms of sidewalk
debris,

Irving Penn, Fashion Photographer, Is Dead at 92. New York Times
ANDY GRUNDBERGPublished: October 8, 2009

•Irving Penn

After-dinner GamesNew York, 1947

•Macro lens

•Macro photography is close-up photography of
usually very small subjects.
•A macro lens literally opens up a whole
new world of photographic subject matter.
It can even cause one to think differently
about everyday objects. However, despite
these exciting possibilities
•http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials
/macro-lenses.htm

•Macro lens

A2 30112011

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