Photography and Everyday Objects

PHOTOGRAPHY AND EVERYDAY OBJECTS


Why photograph inanimate objects, which neither move nor change? Many of the earliest photographs were still life of necessity: only statues, books, and urns could hold still long enough to leave their images on paper. But with the still lifes of Roger Fenton introduce a new note: the dusty skin of a grape, a flower petal curled and darkened at the edge. Photographic still life is about our sensual experience of everyday objects, and the inevitability of decay.


The nineteenth-century art critic Théophile Thoré objected to the French term for still life, nature morte, proclaiming, “Everything is alive and moves, everything breathes in and exhales, everything is in a constant state of metamorphosis… There is no dead nature!” The Czech photographer Josef Sudek tersely echoed this thought when he said that to the photographer’s eye, “a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings.”

André Kertész



In 1928 Kertesz photographed a fork, or rather the idea of a fork - a fork that represented the idea of form and the idea of light; light gliding perfectly over an object, which then transcends its usual practical function and becomes a vehicle for deeper thoughts.
Kertesz was not trying to create an abstract, but to reveal the beauty hidden within objects.


"Life is composed of such fleeting glimpses of beauty, but one must learn to look at the world in wonder in order to be able to catch these moments of enchantment before they fade away"




After his wife Elizabeth’s death in 1977, Kertesz began placing objects that reminded him of her or of their life together in front of the window of his New York apartment and shooting color Polaroids of them. The series was eventually collected in a book called From My Window. Through this same window in previous decades, Kertész had taken black-and-white pictures of Washington Square Park and surrounding rooftops with a telephoto lens. Now the city became a soft, distant backdrop for his miniature theater of memory.



Edward Weston
On 10th March 1924 Weston wrote in his diary - "What is the best use of a camera? You only have to look at the masterpieces of a great sculptor or a great painter to know that a camera should be used for the recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh." And later "To photograph a rock means that the image should be more than a rock. A meaning not an interpretation."

A few years after writing those words Weston produced a series of photographs of Peppers, in which they have all transcended their ordinary existence to become objects of muscular beauty.


(Paul - Appologies for not attending class today I am having some financial trouble and as I am home alone consequently cannot afford the journey to college this morning. This issue will be rectified soon - I hope! )