Stil Life & Abstract Photography

March 2nd, 2015

Still Life & Abstract Photography


Ann Lauterbach writes, "No longer embedded in the habits of the domestic, but still indebted to the idea of materiality, these photographs reevaluate the complex visual rhetoric of cultural construction...The photographic still life forces us to reconsider the importance of a genre". Still life photos can often be constructed by the artist or are already constructed by someone or something else. Rhetoric reminds us that what is often seen in a visual image, told in a speech, or heard in a song is revealing but at the very same time concealment is also taking place. Still life photography can be a manipulation to reveal and conceal whatever the artist has in mind. What can a still life photo show us? What can we learn from a still life photo? Abstract photography can also teach us, if we let it. Professional food and interior photographer Tim Clinch says to "slow down"and experiment with lighting and virtually a different story can be told than what is assumed of a collection of objects( pg. 42, 2010). Clinch also mentions to work as simply as possible and let the subject do the work (pg. 51, 2010). Abstract art and still life photography go hand in hand because often still life images contain rather mundane, simple, perhaps even ordinary objects. However, it's the way the camera captures those objects that give new meaning those objects and life to that photo. It's a manipulation of sorts but that construction has the ability to tell more about culture and the world we live in than what we may normally think about a group of objects, or even just one object. In Keven Ann Seaver's article that Lynne Guimond Findlay wrote it's stated that, "Good abstract art challenges the viewer to accept the possibility that artwork doesn't have to be about anything organic, geometrical, or even pictographic at all...it can just be art" ( pg. 2, 2013). I find solace in abstract photography and still life photography because it's not necessesarily a fleeting moment that gets to be caught but the opposite. Still life photography and abstract photography allows the photographer and audience to take the time to reflect and think and look at a collection of objects in different way and how that arrangement conveys meaning. 

An abstract photographer known as Yung Cheng Lin (aka 3cm) did a photo project depicting female attributions in 2014.  Caro's article,  Abstract Photos of the Female Form by Yung Cheng Lin (aka 3cm), on the selection of abstract photos by 3cm comments, "Sexuality, menstruation, maturity and birth are all running themes in his photos, an ongoing larger body of work" (pg. 1, 2014). 3cm's photos have a lot of manipulation to them that occurred behind the scenes of the photograph, but as a result his work allows for a lot of questioning to be done regarding the female objectification as seen in mainstream media. 3cm notes that, "There is no explanation for my images because I want there to be various, different interpretations, and I would like to see what those are" (pg. 1, 2014). His abstract visual displays of the female form allows the viewer's comfort zone to be stretched and further allows us to question the tolerated, regulated, and rather seemingly normal practices behind the objectification of women's bodies in mainstream society.

http://hifructose.com/2014/08/01/abstract-photos-of-the-female-form-by-yung-cheng-lin-aka-3cm/ 

3cm article: http://hifructose.com/2014/08/01/abstract-photos-of-the-female-form-by-yung-cheng-lin-aka-3cm/