Still Life: The Object as Subject

Irving Penn (United States, 1917-2009) is best known for his fashion photographs. Yet, he also created elegant and sparse still lifes for clients including Clinique, as well as for his personal interest. Many of Penn’s images, including Composition with Skull and Pear 1979, evoke the exotic as well as the transitory nature of life.

This image connects to an influential tradition in still life painting called “vanitas” that was prominent in Dutch painting of the 17th century. Paintings made in this tradition, including the below image by Peter Caesz, used objects such as the human bones and a melting candle, as seen here, to symbolize the fleeting nature of life and the inevitability of death.

Jan Groover (United States, 1943-2012) creates complex, spatial arrangements that heighten the beauty of the objects and confuse our visual perception. A painter by training, Groover references art history in her photographs, from Renaissance perspective drawings to post-impressionist painter Paul Cezanne’s (1835-1906) tabletop still lifes.

Groover photographed this composition with a large format camera to capture clear-cut detail. She then printed the image using the platinum palladium process on luminous vellum-like paper to enhance the delicacy and the wide range of tones of the objects.

Lorna Simpson (United States, b. 1960) took James Van der Zee’s photographs as her starting point for 9 Props. Van der Zee was an African American photographer who made studio portraits of an emerging Black middle class in Harlem in the early twentieth century, complete with painted backdrops and domestic furnishings that suggest the prosperity of his subjects. Made while she was an artist-in-residence at Pilchuck, a glassblowing school in Seattle, Simpson had artisans recreate the vases that appear in Van der Zee’s pictures. She then photographed the objects and later paired them with texts. Simpson printed the photographs and texts onto felt, a strategy she began using in the mid-1990s, partly as a reaction against her work being pigeonholed in the literalist category of “political art.” By endowing the pictures with tactility and three-dimensionality, Simpson aligns her work with the modernist concern with surface and forms. Keeping the theme uncertain with hazy images and ambiguous text, Simpson’s felt panels are lush objects that use photography to distill and delete, rather than document, touching on issues of class, wealth, and strength of character.

Questions for Looking and Discussion

Lorna Simpson challenges what a portrait can be by depicting vases seen in backgrounds of Van der Zee’s portraits instead of people. How might these objects represent people? Are there any formal qualities you see here that you might also see in a more traditional portrait?

This image features the following text :

Dinner Part with boxer Harry Wills,

1926

James Van Der Zee

Harry Wills aka “The Black Panther,” boxer, businessman- sits with seven other men and women, mostly women with champagne glasses raised as a woman on his left makes a toast in his honor. There are three bottles of champagne, a crystal decanter, a bottle of port, an arrangement of flowers and fruit, and before each guest an untouched china place setting.

Does the text change your understanding of the image? Are you able to imagine the scenes Simpson is describing?

Still Life encourages us to carefully consider the importance of objects, and the symbolic associations we attach to them. An ode is lyrical verse, often with a set structure, that praises its subject, usually an object. With a tradition going back over a thousand years, odes are Greek in origin and were originally accompanied by music. This lesson was written by former MoCP educator, Corinne Rose, and is inspired by an activity led by arts integration specialist Cynthia Weiss and poet Jenn Morea.

• Closely read Pablo Neruda’s poem Ode to the Onion or Ode to My Socks for the attention they pay and praise they give to everyday objects.
• What do you notice about the words and types of description Neruda uses?
• What do you notice about how he arranges the words and phrases?

Read John Keat’s Ode on a Grecian Urn for its more formal and traditional ode structure, which consists of 10-line stanzas, and iambic verse. Notice how the last words in each line within the stanzas rhyme in a pattern of a-b-a-b c-d-e-c-d-e. Most odes end with a concluding line or epode that breaks from the rhythm established in the stanzas.

Notes to Teachers: Decide on the ode structure you would like your students to use among the wide range of simple or more complex possibilities. The Poetry Foundation’s website is a great source of poems-, like contemporary poet Kevin Young’s humorous Ode to The Midwest.

• How does it make you feel? Why?
• List words that describe the characteristics of your subject through at least two senses. How does it look, feel, smell, sound, taste?
• Try to find fresh words to describe your subject rather than relying on the familiar or cliché.

Select a common object that is important to you. Decide what structure you will use for your ode.

Look at what you have written so far and select the elements that you think are most important. Given the structure you have selected, draft lines of text and arrange them into stanzas.

Edit and revise your ode until you are pleased with the results. Read it aloud and discuss it with your classmates.

In her If Nostalgia Were Colored Brown series, Nakeya Brown (United States, b. 1988) considers the role that hair plays in relation to societal expectations of race and gender. Her still life pictures portray beauty products—such as curlers, domed hair dryers, head wraps, and relaxing creams—alongside vintage album covers and against candy-colored pastel backdrops. The images contemplate the political implications of natural hair while calling into question the dominant white standards of beauty in defining contemporary femininity.

Inspired by Nakeya Brown, look around your personal space at your personal objects. Consider things such as the objects on your bedside table, the surface of your desk, and even the pictures you post on your wall or refrigerator.

Choose a few objects to create a still life self-portrait, while considering these questions:

Why are these objects or things significant to you?

What do you think others might learn about you from these objects?

Are the objects homemade or unique, or are they something many people own?

What do you notice about the colors of the objects?

Create a composition out of the objects you choose. Before making a photograph, consider how you will frame or compose the image in your camera. Play with vantage point by looking at the scene from above, below, at close range, farther away, from the side, etc. Choose the vantage point that you think works best for this image and make that picture.

Variation: Instead of creating a self-portrait still life, you can also create a portrait of someone else by looking for interesting arrangements of things in their environment.