Research on Still Life Photography

About still life photography

Still life photography is the depiction of inanimate subject matter, most typically a small grouping of objects. Still life photography, more so than other types of photography, such as landscape or portraiture, gives the photographer more leeway in the arrangement of design elements within a composition.

Still life photography is a demanding art, one in which the photographers are expected to be able to form their work with a refined sense of lighting, coupled with compositional skills. The still life photographer makes pictures rather than takes them. Knowing where to look for propping and surfaces also is a required skill.

Edward Weston

Edward Henry Weston (March 24, 1886 – January 1, 1958) was a 20th-century American photographer. He has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers…"

Weston was born in Chicago and moved to California when he was 21. He knew he wanted to be a photographer from an early age, and initially his work was typical of the soft focus pictorialism that was popular at the time. Within a few years, however, he abandoned that style and went on to be one of the foremost champions of highly detailed photographic images.

As a present for his 16th birthday Weston's father gave him his first camera, a Kodak Bull's-Eye #2, which was a simple box camera. He took it on vacation in the Midwest, and by the time he returned home his interest in photography was enough to lead him to purchase a used 5 × 7 inch view camera. He began photographing in Chicago parks and a farm owned by his aunt, and developed his own film and prints. Later he would remember that even at that early age his work showed strong artistic merit. He said, "I feel that my earliest work of 1903 ‒ though immature ‒ is related more closely, both with technique and composition, to my latest work than are several of my photographs dating from 1913-1920, a period in which I was trying to be artistic.”

Sometime in the fall of 1913, Los Angeles photographer, Margrethe Mather visited Weston's studio because of his growing reputation, and within a few months they developed an intense relationship. Weston was a quiet Midwestern transplant to California, and Mather was a part of the growing bohemian cultural scene in Los Angeles. She was very outgoing and artistic in a flamboyant way, and her permissive sexual morals were far different from the conservative Weston at the time - Mather had been a prostitute and was bisexual with a preference for women. Mather presented a stark contrast to Weston's home life; his wife Flora was described as a "homely, rigid Puritan, and an utterly conventional woman, with whom he had little in common since he abhorred conventions" ‒ and he found Mather's uninhibited lifestyle irresistible and her photographic vision intriguing.

He asked Mather to be his studio assistant, and for the next decade they worked closely together, making individual and jointly signed portraits of such luminaries as Carl Sandburg and Max Eastman. A joint exhibition of their work in 2001 revealed that during this period Weston emulated Mather's style and, later, her choice of subjects. On her own Mather photographed "fans, hands, eggs, melons, waves, bathroom fixtures, seashells and bird’s wings, all subjects that Weston would also explore."] A decade later he described her as "the first important person in my life, and perhaps even now, though personal contact has gone, the most important."

Sometime in 1920 he began photographing nude models for the first time. His first models were his wife Flora and their children, but soon thereafter he took at least three nude studies of Mather. He followed these with several more photographs of nude models, the first of dozens of figure studies he would make of friends and lovers over the next twenty years.

Until now Weston had kept his relationships with other women a secret from his wife, but as he began to photograph more nudes Flora became suspicious about what went on with his models. Chandler recalled that his mother regularly sent him on "errands" to his father's studio and asked him to tell her who was there and what they were doing. 

One of the first who agreed to model nude for Weston was Modotti. She became his primary model for the next several years.

During his lifetime Weston worked with several cameras.
• 8 × 10 Seneca folding-bed view camera with one of several lenses: a Graf Variable, Wollensak Verito or Rapid Rectilinear[55]
• 8 × 10 Universal view camera with either a triple convertible Turner Reich or a 19" Protar
• 4 × 5 view camera, type unknown.
• 3¼ × 4¼ Graflex with a ƒ/4.5 Tessar lens

Weston died at his home on Wildcat Hill on New Year’s Day, 1958. His sons scattered his ashes into the Pacific Ocean at an area then known as Pebbly Beach on Point Lobos. Due to Weston's significant influence in the area, the beach was later renamed Weston Beach. He had $300 in his bank account at the time of his death.

Irving Penn

Irving Penn (June 16, 1917 – October 7, 2009) was an American photographer known for his fashion photography, portraits, and still life’s. Penn's career included work at Vogue magazine, and independent advertising work for clients including Issey Miyake, and Clinique. His work has been exhibited internationally, and continues to inform the art of photography.
Penn's still life compositions are spare and highly-organized, assemblages of food or objects that articulate the abstract interplay of line and volume. Penn's photographs are composed with a great attention to detail, which continues into his craft of developing and making prints of his photographs. Penn experimented with many printing techniques, including prints made on aluminium sheets coated with a platinum emulsion rendering the image with a warmth that untoned silver prints lacked.  His black and white prints are notable for their deep contrast, giving them a clean, crisp look.
While steeped in the Modernist tradition, Penn also ventured beyond creative boundaries. The exhibition of Earthly Bodies consisted of series of posed nudes whose physical shapes range from thin to plump; while the photographs were taken in 1949 and 1950, they were not exhibited until 1980, perhaps in part because of questions about the public reception of the graphic representations of the female nude.
Irving Penn died aged 92 on October 7, 2009 at his home in Manhattan.