Exhibition dates: 14th September, 2010 – 23rd January, 2011

Curator: Paul Martineau, assistant curator in the Department of Photographs at The J. Paul Getty Museum

 

Many thankx to The J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

Thomas Richard Williams (English, 1824-1871)
The Sands of Time
1850-1852
Stereo-daguerreotype
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

This daguerreotype stereograph image by Thomas Richard Williams is a still life memento mori composition. An assemblage of a human skull, an hourglass with the sand running out, an extended compass, and a book abandoned mid-read with eyeglasses placed upside down on the page, the image evokes the temporary nature of mortal life and the inevitability of death. The objects also refer to intellectual pursuits and to the inevitable triumph of the soul over the mind.

 

 

Armand-Pierre Séguier (French, 1803-1876)
Still Life with Plaster Casts
1839-1842
Daguerreotype 8 x 6 in.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

Baron Séguier was part of a small circle of amateurs that surrounded Jacques-Louis-Mandé Daguerre. Daguerre invented the daguerreotype, the process announced to the world in 1839 that produces highly detailed positive images on silver-coated copper plates. Some of the first successful daguerreotypes depicted arrangements of small-scale plaster copies of sculpture. The exceptionally long exposure times precluded the use of living models, a problem that would not be resolved until about 1841.

 

 

Louis-Rémy Robert (French, 1811-1882)
[Still Life with Statuette and Vases]
Negative 1855; print 1870s
Carbon print
32.4 x 26.2cm (12 3/4 x 10 5/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

Equally as accomplished as their Parisian colleagues, the Sèvres photographers (Louis Robert and Victor Regnault) turned their cameras toward more intimate subjects – the gardens, courtyards, and narrow roads of Sèvres, friends and family at home and in the factory’s ateliers, views of the banks of the Seine, and tabletop still lifes – and rendered them with deliberate informality and a painterly facture.

Louis Robert (1810-1882) grew up at the royal porcelain factory at Sèvres; his father was the head of the glass-painting atelier, a position that Louis himself assumed at the age of twenty-two, following his father’s death. In 1847, he was named head of the painting workshop, and in 1871 Director of the Manufacture. Inclined by training and temperament toward endeavours that brought together the fields of painting and chemistry, Robert was among the earliest French artists to take up paper photography, around 1850. After Regnault, an important chemist and pioneering photographer, became director of the porcelain factory in 1852, Robert’s photographic activity intensified, no doubt because the two men experimented together and encouraged each other’s work.

Malcolm Daniel. “Louis-Rémy Robert (1810-1882),” on The Metropolitan Museum of Art website, October 1, 2004 [Online] Cited 05/11/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

 

 

Roger Fenton (English, 1819-1869)
[Still Life with Game and Gun]
About 1859
Albumen silver print
19.8 x 17.6cm (7 13/16 x 6 15/16 in)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

 

Charles Aubry (French, 1811-1877)
[An Arrangement of Tobacco Leaves and Grass]
about 1864
Albumen silver print
Image: 47 x 37.3cm (18 1/2 x 14 11/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

After working as a designer of patterns for carpets, fabrics, and wallpapers, Aubry formed a company to manufacture plaster casts and make photographs of plants and flowers. His detailed prints of natural forms were intended to replace the lithographs traditionally used by students of industrial design. This close-up of a delicate arrangement of leaves and grasses on a lace-covered background appears as if a slight movement of air could disturb it.

 

 

Eadweard J. Muybridge (American born England, 1830-1904)
The Attitudes of Animals in Motion
Negative 1878-1879; print 1881
Iron salt process
Closed: 19.5 x 24.7 x 3.1cm (7 11/16 x 9 3/4 x 1 1/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

“… A photograph is made by one of the 24 cameras at every 12 inches of progress, made by the animal during a single stride. The length of each stride may be calculated by the line of consecutive numbers arranged parallel with the track, a number being placed every 12 inches of distance.”

~ Eadweard J. Muybridge

The possibility for moving pictures originated from a rich man’s bet: whether or not a galloping horse ever had all four feet off the ground at any time during its stride. Because the unaided eye cannot see such an instantaneous event, Leland Stanford hired Eadweard Muybridge to photograph his racehorse, Occidental. After Muybridge produced the proof to win the bet, he continued his motion experiments and documented them in this album. He wrote the above passage on the album’s first page, describing his methodical approach of rigging twenty-four cameras with electromagnetic shutters – tripped by wires as an animal ran across a track.

Photographs of the cameras show how wires were attached to modified lens shutters; others depict the racetrack, where a long shed with the battery of cameras faced a track with a wall behind to silhouette subjects. Most pages depict animals and humans walking, running, and jumping before the cameras. Muybridge later devised the zoopraxiscope, a rotating device that animated sequences of images.

 

 

Frederick H. Hollyer (English, 1837-1933)
Lilies
About 1885
Platinum print
33.7 x 19.1cm (13 1/4 x 7 1/2 in)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

 

Baron Adolf De Meyer (American, 1868-1949)
Glass and Shadows
1905
Photogravure
Image: 8 3/4 x 6 9/16 in
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

During the first decade of the 20th century, photographers such as De Meyer and Heinrich Kühn helped advance the idea that photography should emulate other forms of art. Here De Meyer photographed several glass objects through a scrim. The thin woven fabric softens the backlit objects, replicating the subtle tonal effects prized in etchings by artists from Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn to James McNeill Whistler.

 

 

Heinrich Kühn (Austrian born Germany, 1866-1944)
[Tea Still-life, Version III]
1907
Platinum print
27.5 x 37.8cm (10 13/16 x 14 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

 

The J. Paul Getty Museum presents In Focus: Still Life, a survey of some of the innovative ways photographers have explored and refreshed this traditional genre, on view at the Getty Center in the Center for Photographs from September 14, 2010 – January 23, 2011.

“Still life photography has served as both a conventional and an experimental form during periods of significant aesthetic and technological change,” said Paul Martineau, assistant curator, Department of Photographs, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and curator of the exhibition. “One of our goals for the exhibition was to show how still life photographs can be both traditional and surprising.”

With its roots in antiquity, the term “still life” is derived from the Dutch word stilleven, coined during the 17th century, when painted examples enjoyed immense popularity throughout Europe. The impetus for a new term came as artists created compositions of increasing complexity, bringing together a greater variety of objects to communicate allegorical meanings. Still life featured prominently in the early experiments of the pioneers of the photographic medium and, more than 170 years later, it continues to be a significant motif for contemporary photographers.

Drawn exclusively from the Museum’s collection, the exhibition includes photographs by Charles Aubry, Henry Bailey, Hans Bellmer, Jo Ann Callis, Sharon Core, Baron Adolf De Meyer, Walker Evans, Roger Fenton, Frederick H. Hollyer, Heinrich Kühn, Sigmar Polke, Man Ray, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Paul Outerbridge, Louis-Rémy Robert, Baron Armand-Pierre Séguier, Paul Strand, Josef Sudek, and Thomas R. Williams.

The exhibition is arranged chronologically and includes a broad range of photographic processes, from daguerreotypes and albumen silver prints made in the 19th century to gelatin silver prints, and cibachrome prints made in the 20th century, to digital prints from the 21st century.

Newly acquired works will be on display for the first time: Still Life with Triangle and Red Eraser (1985) by American Irving Penn, Lorikeet with Green Cloth (2006) by Australian Marian Drew, and Blow Up: Untitled 15 (2007) by Israeli Ori Gersht (Gersht loosely based his Blow Up series on traditional floral still life paintings. His arrangements of flowers are frozen and then detonated. The explosion is captured using synchronised digital cameras, with the fragmentary detritus caught in remarkable detail. 

This diptych (pair) belies the notion of still life as something motionless as it explores the relationships among painting and photography, art and science, and creation and destruction.)

For Bowl with Sugar Cubes, photographer André Kertész created a still life out of a simple bowl, spoon, and sugar cubes, demonstrating the photographer’s interest in the compositional possibilities of layering basic geometric forms on top of one another – three rectangles in a circle (sugar cubes and bowl) and a circle in a square (bowl and the cropped printing paper). A visual sophistication is achieved through his adroit use of simple objects and dramatic lighting.

Other selections from In Focus: Still Life include Edward Weston’s Bananas and Orange, which depicts a symmetrical fan of bananas punctuated by one oddly shaped orange, and Frederick Sommer’s The Anatomy of a Chicken, which uses the discarded parts of a chicken to create a visual commentary. Influenced by Surrealism, Sommer embraced unexpected juxtapositions and literary allusions to express his intellectual and philosophical ideas. In Anatomy of a Chicken, a severed head, three sunken eyes, and eviscerated organs glisten on a white board. Evoking biblical imagery, medieval grotesques, and heraldic emblems, Sommer calls on the viewer to consider the endless cycle of birth and death, the cruel reality of the food chain, and man’s role in this violence.

In Focus: Still Life will be the seventh installation of the ongoing In Focus series of exhibitions, thematic presentations of photographs from the Getty’s permanent collection. Previous exhibitions focused on The Nude, The Landscape, The Portrait, Making a Scene (staged photographs), The Worker, and most recently, Tasteful Pictures.“

Press release from The J. Paul Getty Museum website

 

 

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
[Black Bottle]
Negative about 1919; print 1923-1939
Gelatin silver, on Cykora paper print
Image (trimmed to mount): 32.7 x 24.8 cm (12 7/8 x 9 3/4 in.)
Sheet: 34.4 x 27.1cm (13 9/16 x 10 11/16 in.)
Mount (irregular): 35.1 x 27.8 cm (13 13/16 x 10 15/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Aperture Foundation

 

“The photographer’s problem is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium, for it is precisely here that honesty no less than intensity of vision is the prerequisite of a living expression. This means a real respect for the thing in front of him expressed in terms of chiaroscuro… “

So wrote Paul Strand two years before he made this negative of a black bottle sitting in a white sink. Through the manipulation of light and dark tones, Strand transformed this ordinary subject matter. The four overflow drain holes become graphic markings in the upper left, while the muted grey shadow cast by the bottle assumes an almost-human form against the porcelain. The diagonals of light that illuminate the scene appear like radiant beams.

 

 

Albert Renger-Patzsch (German, 1897-1966)
Flatirons for Shoe Manufacture, Fagus Factory (Bügeleisen für Schuhfabrikation, Fagus-Werk, Alfeld)
1926
Gelatin silver print
Sheet: 22.9 x 16.8cm (9 x 6 5/8 in)
© Albert Renger-Patzsch Archiv / Ann u. Jürgen Wilde, Zülpich / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

“We still don’t sufficiently appreciate the opportunity to capture the magic of material things. The structure of wood, stone, and metal can be shown with a perfection beyond the means of painting… To do justice to modern technology’s rigid linear structure… only photography is capable of that.”

So wrote Albert Renger-Patzsch in 1927 about the camera’s innate ability to depict the Industrial Age. Here he studied the materials of identically shaped, finished wooden handles and industrially produced steel heads, while also representing the flatirons as an army of tools standing at attention like bowling pins. Renger-Patzsch’s photograph celebrates the beauty of the commonplace object.

 

 

Frederick Sommer (American born Italy, 1905-1999)
The Anatomy of a Chicken
1939
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24.1 x 19.1cm (9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in)
© Frederick and Frances Sommer Foundation
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

 

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (American, 1890-1976)
Dead Leaf
1942
Gelatin silver print
Image: 9 1/2 x 7 13/16 in
© Man Ray Trust ARS-ADAGP
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

Remarkable for its starkness, this photograph of a brittle castor bean leaf appeared with four others by Man Ray in the October 1943 issue of Minicam Photography. In his caption for the image, Man Ray wrote with uncharacteristic poignancy of the knowledge that “the dying leaf would be completely gone tomorrow.” It is tempting to interpret the melancholy sentiment of the work in terms of the artist’s growing discontent concerning his lack of recognition and financial success in Los Angeles and his fear that the work he left behind in France might be destroyed during the war.

Here, Man Ray applies an avant garde sensibility to the tradition of memento mori.

 

 

Marie Cosindas (American, 1923-2017)
Asparagus Still Life I
1967
Polaroid Polarcolor 58 instant print
8.9 x 11.4cm (3 1/2 x 4 1/2 in)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Marie Cosindas

 

Cosindas was among the first photographers to embrace the potential of Polaroid colour film during the early 1960s. She varied her use of camera filters, exposure times, lighting temperature, and development times to achieve portraits and still lifes that resemble paintings in their vibrant use of colour.

For Asparagus Still Life I, Cosindas created an elaborate assemblage of fruits, vegetables, flowers, and vessels to evoke the luxurious bounty of 17th-century Dutch banquet paintings.

 

 

Irving Penn (American, 1917-2009)
Still Life with Triangle and Red Eraser, New York, 1985
1985
Dye-bleach print
Image: 22 3/4 x 18 1/8 in (57.8 x 46cm)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

 

Still life derives from the Dutch word stilleven, 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.

Still life has come to serve, like landscape or portraiture, as a category within art. Although it typically refers to depictions of inanimate things, because it incorporates a vast array of influences from different cultures and periods in history, it has always resisted precise definition.

This exhibition presents some of the innovative ways photographers have explored and refreshed this traditional genre. During the 19th century, still life photographs tended to resemble still life paintings, with similar subjects and arrangements. Beginning in the 20th century, still life photographs have mirrored the subjects and styles that have more broadly concerned photographers in their time.

A New Medium

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

In the late 1830s, Baron Armand-Pierre Séguier, a close associate of Daguerre, created this elegant daguerreotype that features small-scale copies of famous sculptures in the Louvre and Uffizi museum collections.

In the mid-1800s, Charles Aubry was an accomplished practitioner of still-life photography who came to the medium by way of his professional interest in applied arts and industrial design. After working as a pattern designer for carpets, fabrics, and wallpapers, he formed a company to manufacture plaster casts and make photographs of plants and flowers.

Aubrey’s detailed prints of natural forms – like this close-up of plants on a lace-covered background – were intended to replace lithographs traditionally used by students of industrial design.

Photography as Art

By the first decade of the 20th century, art photographers like Baron Adolf de Meyer employed soft-focus lenses and painterly darkroom techniques to make photographs that resembled drawings and prints. The vogue at the time was to produce images that reflected a handcrafted approach, while asserting photography as an art medium in its own right.

Here, De Meyer photographed an arrangement of objects through a scrim. The pattern of thin, woven fabric softens the backlit objects and helps replicate the subtle tonal effects prized in etchings and aquatints.

Modernism

Several decades into the twentieth-century, the American artist Man Ray emerged as a pioneer of two European art movements, Dada and Surrealism, in which the element of surprise figured prominently. This image seems both unusual for Man Ray in its apparent straight-forward approach, but also typical in its somewhat dark emotional tone.

By selecting a dead leaf with a claw-like appearance and photographing it against a wood-grain board, Man Ray updated the concept of memento mori (“remember that you must die”), a motif popular in centuries-old still-life paintings.

New Directions

In that same vein, the best contemporary still-life photographs recall past styles of art while containing a paradox relevant to today. Contemporary photographer Sharon Core became known for re-creations of painter Wayne Thiebaud’s pop-art dessert tableaux. Her series of still-life compositions, inspired by the 18th-century American painter Raphaelle Peale, followed.

For this series, entitled Early American, Core studied the compositional structure of his paintings, replicated the mood of the lighting, and when she couldn’t find the right vegetables and flowers, grew her own from heirloom seeds.

The stilled lives of objects have served so well as both experimental and conventional forms in the past, that still life may well be the anchor that allows photographers to explore new and yet unimagined depths.

Anonymous. “In Focus: Still Life,” from the J. Paul Getty Museum website [Online] Cited 02/01/2020. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

 

 

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Bananas and Orange
April 1927
Gelatin silver print
Image: 18.9 x 23.7cm (7 7/16 x 9 5/16 in)
© 1981 Arizona Board of Regents, Center for Creative Photography
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

Simultaneous with his work on shells and nudes, Edward Weston began photographing bananas, gourds, and other still-life subjects. He was staying close to his studio in 1927, partly because he found his growing Los Angeles surroundings unappealing and partly to be available for portrait commissions. But he also realised during this time that art could be modern without depicting industrial themes. As he wrote in his daybook, “Are not shells, bodies, clouds as much of today as machines? Does it make any difference what subject matter is used to express a feeling toward life!.”

In 1928 Weston moved to San Francisco and opened a portrait studio with his son Brett (1911-1993), who had chosen to become a photographer himself. In December of that year the two packed up and moved to Carmel, a small town along the coast with a significant population of artists. It was there that Weston began focusing attention on peppers, which he typically ate after photographing them. Those who followed his output commonly saw sexual content in his still-life compositions, although he repeatedly denied having directly intended such allusions. He resented those who pigeonholed his work in this way, calling them “the sexually unemployed belching gaseous irrelevancies from an undigested Freudian ferment!” He wrote in his daybook that he photographed peppers because “of the endless variety in form manifestations, because of their extraordinary surface texture, because of the power, the force suggested in their amazing convolutions!” At the same time, however, Weston was aware that the simplified, heightened reality of his presentations, whether they be of nudes, vegetables, fruits, or his later dunes, could conjure up other associations. He was keenly interested in the idea that “all basic forms are so closely related as to be visually equivalent!”

Weston’s work during the late 1920s and early 1930s was well received. Arthur Millier, an avant-garde critic, reviewed it frequently in the Los Angeles Times, and it was exhibited in modern art galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Carmel.

Brett Abbott. Edward Weston, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 56. © 2005, J. Paul Getty Trust. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

 

 

André Kertész (American born Hungary, 1894-1985)
[Bowl with Sugar Cubes]
1928
Gelatin silver print
Image: 16.7 x 16.4cm (6 9/16 x 6 1/2 in)
© Estate of André Kertész
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

While living in Paris as a young photographer during the 1920s, Kertész became intrigued by still life, a motif that he continually returned to throughout his long career. Bowl with Sugar Cubes demonstrates his interest in the compositional possibilities of layering basic geometric forms on top of one another – three rectangles in a circle (sugar cubes and a bowl) and a circle in a square (the bowl and the cropped printing paper). Visual sophistication is achieved through his adroit use of simple objects and dramatic lighting.

 

 

Jo Ann Callis (American, b. 1940)
Untitled (Strawberry Pie), #2
1993
Silver-dye bleach print
27.9 x 35.5cm (11 x 14 in)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Jo Ann Callis

 

 

Marian Drew (Australian, b. 1960)
Lorikeet with Green Cloth
2006
Digital pigment print
Image: 71.8 x 89.5cm (28 1/4 x 35 1/4 in.)
Sheet: 73 x 90.2cm (28 3/4 x 35 1/2 in.)
© Marian Drew
Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

Drew’s tabletop still life compositions feature fruits, vegetables, and dead animals and birds presented as game. While the unusual angles and lustrous colours bring to mind paintings by Paul Cézanne, the richness of the fabrics and dramatic lighting look back to 17th-century examples. Road kill gives Drew’s photographs a dynamic twist that calls into question mankind’s stewardship of the earth and its creatures.

 

 

Ori Gersht (Israeli, b. 1967)
Blow Up: Untitled 15
2007
Digital chromogenic prints
Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council of the J. Paul Getty Museum
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Ori Gersht

 

 

Sharon Core (American, b. 1965)
Early American – Still Life with Steak
2008
Chromogenic print
Image: 17 3/16 x 23 7/16 in
© Sharon Core
Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council of the J. Paul Getty Museum
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

Core studied the compositional structure and lighting of still life paintings by Raphaelle Peale for a series of photographs she titled Early American. When she found it difficult to find vegetables that looked like the examples in Peale’s paintings, she grew her own from heirloom seeds. Core’s methodical approach yields compositions that hover between past and present.

 

 

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