Posts tagged: still life photography

The Potato Picker

When the Belarusian photographer Alexey Shlyk was a child, he encountered a singular type of necklace handmade by his grandmother. She had used apple seeds in lieu of diamonds and rubies, stringing them together one-by-one before varnishing their surfaces. “It has always been an object that fascinated me,” the artist admits. The Appleseed Necklace is Shlyk’s tribute to the ingenuity of his people, who, during the scarcity of the Soviet Era, made do with whatever they had.

Bay/Sky, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1987.

New York City, 1975.

Joel Meyerowitz: Where I Find Myself (Laurence King) is a pièce de résistance, a masterful feat of publishing that sets the bar as high as it can possibly reach. The photographer’s magnum opus opens in the present day, with his most recent body of work and unfolds in reverse chronological order, leading us through a spellbinding life in photography that is simply unparalleled.

“How did I get here? Living on a farm in Tuscany. Nearly eighty years old, and once again the force of photography provokes me to think about something I’ve never considered as being of interest to me,” Joel Meyerowitz writes in the first chapter, which introduces the still lifes he has been creating between 2012 and 2017, documenting the objects of painters Paul Cézanne and Giorgio Morandi.

“I’ve always been a street photographer, first and foremost, and though I’ve danced to tunes other than the jazzy tempo of the street, it’s where my native instincts for seeing first developed,” the East Bronx native writes. “Half a century ago, I was part of a duo that walked the streets of New York City almost every day, Garry Winogrand and me. We loved it out on the streets, loved the surprise of the unexpected events, and our shared appreciation of them after they happened, and how it charged our conversations with new ideas.”

If you visit the Instagram page for Polina Washington’s new project Solution, you’ll see only three words: “trash and nature.” And that’s exactly what the St. Petersburg photographer has chosen to shoot. In fact, she’s gone out of her way to observe human detritus and environmental fragments– in other words, all the things she once thought we never worth her time.

The floral forest of dreams © Dina Shirin (@dinashirin), Bronx, NY

Rhapsody © Katharina Will, Düsseldorf, Germany

The Print Swap is a submissions-based project by Feature Shoot connecting thousands of photographers all over the world. Here’s how it works: any and all images can be submitted via Instagram using the hashtag #myfeatureshoot. Outstanding photographs are selected for the swap, and participating photographers give and receive prints. Prints are mailed out internationally and randomly, so part of the excitement is that it’s always a surprise. You never know what print you’ll get until the day it arrives.

Over the last few months, we’ve been highlighting some of the extraordinary images from The Print Swap by featuring them in online group shows, each with a different theme. This time, we drew inspiration from the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe, Edward Weston, and Imogen Cunningham and focused on a single subject: flowers. After combing through The Print Swap collection in search of sunflowers, roses, tulips, and daisies, we plucked out some of our favorite blossoms to share with you.

In photographs, flowers can be metaphors–for love, loss, or rebirth. My Heart’s Desire by Mark Reynolds is part of the artist’s Funeral Flower Series. In Meredith Andrew’s work, plucked flowers are the last remaining vestige of a season gone by. In Dina Shirin’s picture, the silhouette of a woman explores an alternate realm, defined only by the vague shape of a flower. Still, flowers don’t always have to be symbols of larger themes. Sometimes flowers are simply flowers, and their beauty is more than enough. Jules Hebert regularly photographs the rotating cast of flowers on display in his New York lobby.

This Valentine’s Day, enjoy a collection of flowers, and feel free to peruse The Print Swap Instagram feed for more inspiring imagery. Photographers are welcome to submit images to The Print Swap by tagging them #theprintswap on Instagram. We also accept submissions emailed to [email protected] New images submitted between now and March 23rd will be considered not only for The Print Swap but also for our upcoming Print Swap exhibition, happening at BERLIN BLUE art. Learn more about the show here.

When photographer Amy Lombard was a little girl, she visited South Carolina, where she saw a woman with extraordinarily long fingernails— “the kind that curl.” The memory has followed her into adulthood, lingering in the background throughout the years.

When nail art became a mainstream, Instagram-fueled obsession, NAILS (2015) was born, and now, Lombard has followed it up with NAILS Part 2, a series of images focusing exclusively on extravagant toenails.

Pema Lamu (73) from the village Zhashi. Faces and hands of most Mosuo women are marked by the daily working hours in the fields. There is a clear division of labor between men and women. Women are responsible for household duties and farmwork and men for heavy labor and funerals. Usually, it is the Dabu who is working the hardest.

Du Zhi Ma holds a photograph in her hand, a portrait of her, which was taken about 35 years ago. In the photo, she carries one of her three children in her arms.

In order to get to China’s Lugu Lake, where the Mosuo people live, German photographer Karolin Klüppel traveled by road. That road, she says, has only been around for one or two decades. Before then, the area was relatively remote, sheltered from curious outsiders. Today, there’s not only a road but also an airport. Tourists arrive by plane a few times a week. Life is changing for the Mosuo, especially the women.

A classroom for members of the jail is lined with desks. Even though the desks are new, the participants have scratched their names, dates, hearts, and slogans into the wood. The black seats with wooden desks reminded me of a line of black clad IS members carrying kalashnikovs. At Al-Ha’ir prison, I had to use the prison’s camera and wasn’t allowed to take photos of any of the staff or inmates, which left me to photograph the evidence left behind by the inmates. I photographed some of the etchings in the wood, but the prison censored these photos. © David Degner/Getty Images

Inmates have a small area with astroturf to enjoy the sun at the end of each cell block. The Ha’ir prison is primarily for terrorists, we are told. Talking to human rights activists, however, gives the impression that there are different departments with different standards. Political prisoners sometimes come to Ha’ir, but hardly in the comfortable cells jihadists have. While the writers were interviewing another inmate under supervision, I was able to talk with some inmates alone. They saw many new inmates arrive after the bombing of Shia mosques in the eastern provinces in May 2015 and felt they were arrested randomly. As one inmate said, there is always the official story and then the unofficial story which they won’t let us see. But he said he couldn’t go into details. © David Degner/Getty Images

The Family House is designed like a boutique hotel with all the amenities for a family visit. The suites allow inmates to live with their family for short periods of time while incarcerated. The families and inmates arrive in chauffeured cars with the hotel logo; guests are given a key for their rooms, and the all female staff cares for them during their stay. © David Degner/Getty Images

In May of last year, Cairo photographer David Degner and Swiss journalist Monika Bolliger traveled to the Al-Ha’ir Prison in Saudi Arabia to see the living conditions of men who had been incarcerated on terrorism-related charges.

A chipped bowl containing a few grains of rice and some dried beans. Grains are in short supply because the government has banned farmers from allowing their crops to grow more than three feet tall along Cameroon’s highways. Militants had been hiding in the fields in order to ambush passing convoys.

Not so long ago, Lake Chad was one of the largest bodies of water in Africa. The thick reeds and vital wetlands around its basin provided vast freshwater reserves, breeding grounds for fish, fertile soil for agriculture, and grasslands where farmers grazed their animals. But as climate change has taken its toll, the lake has shrunk by 90 percent. Today, only 965 square miles remain. Those who still live by the lake struggle to survive, beset by chronic drought and the slow onset of ecological catastrophe.

This looming crisis has only worsened with the rise of Boko Haram, which has driven some 74,000 Nigerians into neighboring Cameroon. More refugees and fewer crops have proven to be a deadly combination in a region already ravaged by climate change. More than seven million people around Lake Chad are now suffering from severe hunger, including 500,000 children wracked by acute malnutrition. Those fortunate enough to be granted a spot in a refugee camp often receive no more than one meal a day.

We often turn away from images of the starving and hungry, from the skeletal profiles and ­hollowed­­-­out eyes that attest to the misery and suffering. But photographer Chris de Bode has found a way to focus our attention on this forgotten crisis. A single vegetable, a dried fish, a bowl of red maize—sometimes this is all a mother has to divide between her children each day. She may have to choose to feed her two youngest and send the teenagers to a village to beg for food. These images do not ask us to look into their eyes and see ourselves. They ask us to look at the emptiness of their bowls and reflect on the fullness of our own. We see their hunger through what little they have. We measure their suffering in the most universal unit of all: a single meal.

Read the rest of Lisa Palmer’s article on Chris de Bode’s photographs at The New Republic.

Irving Penn, American, Plainfield, New Jersey, 1917–2009, New York.
Pablo Picasso at La Californie, Cannes
1957, printed February 1985 Platinum-palladium print
Image: 18 5/8 x 18 5/8 in. (47.3 x 47.3 cm.) Sheet: 24 15/16 x 22 in. (63.3 x 55.9 cm.) Mount: 26 x 22 in. (66 x 55.9 cm.) Overall: 26 x 22 in. (66 x 55.9 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation IP .123

Irving Penn, American, Plainfield, New Jersey, 1917–2009, New York.
Three Asaro Mud Men, New Guinea
1970, printed 1976 Platinum-palladium print
Image: 20 1/8 x 19 1/2 in. (51.1 x 49.6    cm.) Sheet: 24 15/16 x 22 1/16 in. (63.3 x 56 cm.) Mount: 26 1/16 x 22 1/16 in. (66.2 x 56 cm.) Overall: 26 1/16 x 22 1/16 in. (66.2 x 56 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation IP .154

“Photography is just the present stage of man’s visual history,” Irving Penn (1917-2009) sagely observed, recognizing the infinite possibilities of the human animal to create technology that would advance our ability to document, represent, and re-envision the world. As a master of the form, Penn understood that the only thing that limits us is imagination.

For seven decades he worked, becoming a master of studio photography with the ability to craft pictures of anything he wished. Here was a man who could transform his very first commission for Jell-o pudding into a resounding success, even though, as Penn realized, it was, “a abstract nothing, it’s just a blob of ectoplasm.”

Yet with that formless glob of goop crafted in a laboratory, Penn was able to entice consumers to buy and serve the product en masse. It’s precisely this ability to transcend the particulars that made Penn a master of whatever form he chose to shoot, be in portraits, fashion, still life, food, nudes, or flowers. He understood that the photograph was an invitation to engage, to gaze upon the world without actually having to interact with it.