Still life as a means of self expression

Still life photography involves a completely different approach to that used by most photographers. Instead of selecting and framing bits of the world in the viewfinder the still life photographer has to build the picture in front of the camera. This is rather like the way a painter might work, starting with an empty canvas. Every mark that subsequently appears in the picture is there by choice and has significance.

Still life photographs differfrom other photographs in another way. They do not purport to be any kind of objective record of how things are in the world. Although they cannot escape the ontological link with the world common to all camera images in that the objects depicted actually existed, the arrangement of the objects and manipulation ofperspective or viewpoint is purely the whim of the photographer. It shows nothing of the real relationships between objects.

The still life photographer uses objects in a symbolic way, as metaphors to try and communicate an emotion orfeeling, not necessarily about the objects actually depicted, but about what those objects might stand for.