Still life photography by Elena Kolesneva
Posts marked still life
Flowers don’t get much more delicate than these lovely ones photographed by Angela Fanton
Images from Barry Rosenthal’s photo series Found in Nature
Rosenthal on his project:
My quest for shooting Photobotanicals took me from the countryside to the beach. While scouting for beach grasses, I found many scattered plastic bottle tops, pop tops and other detritus. There was too much of this stuff to just leave it where it washed up.
It had to be cleaned up. Using my collection bags, I cleaned up the beach. Themes for this new series began to run through my head. There were so many bottle caps, lighters and shotgun shells that my excitement grew with every new find that went into the bag. I decided to give these found objects a way of expressing something else about nature. It seems, given time the plastic would take over and replace nature. It is evident in the Found in Nature collection that the work of caring for the environment is yet to begin.
Disassembly by Todd McLellan is equal parts chaos and order.
Flower Studies by Bryan Warakomski “explores the fragile state of nature exploring life and death, beauty and destruction”.
Flowers reflected by Sue Demetriou
From the Compost by Denis Roussel
Roussel on his work:
I have spent most of my life studying the sciences and earned a degree in chemistry and environmental science in France. When I moved to the United States, I decided to return to school and study art and, more specifically, photography.
I have always been under the impression that art and science were in various ways very similar. In the past they were not seen as completely separated enterprises. In earlier civilizations the artist and the scientist were often the same person. Art and science were seen as two complimentary sources for comprehension and knowledge. I think that their ultimate goals are still the same: to gain a better understanding of the world we live in and who we are. I also see both art and science as languages that allow us to explore and communicate ideas.
Photography is arguably the most suitable medium to build a bridge between art and science. It was born out of the marriage of artistic inquiry and scientific innovation. The two men credited for fathering photography illustrate the bi-disciplinary aspect of the medium. Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre was an artist, famous for his enormous diaroma paintings, whereas William Henry Fox Talbot was a scientist, elected to the Royal Society in 1832.
Selections from Life Science, a project by scientist and photographer Eran Gilat.
Gilat on her work:
This is an attempt of mine to present a personal document of my individual experience in Medical Science research. The project is inspired by long lasting scientific confrontation with various biological specimens, while engaged in Physiological and Medical studies and my devotion to imaging. It is my personal expression and thoughts on the incredible complexity of the organism and its highly accomplished organs and aesthetics in general.
In “Life Science” I wish to offer an artistic expression that brings together observation on scientific research with an emphasize on preparation hierarchy and aesthetics.
Many life scientists experience during their career a hierarchical preparatory process, confronting, simple systems as well as more complicated ones to simplify extrapolation to human being applications.
It takes a while for a young clinician or a researcher to accommodate the laboratory or hospital scenes to enable good performance. This is done by extensive training; some cannot adjust to the visuals. I feel my photographic activity carries me to these regions too. I found myself during my studies engaged with these issues, and I believe I am dealing with the aesthetics of the scene, improvising various contexts, the tools and paraphernalia are not just the typical ones used in the operating place. “Life Science” is forcing the biological tissue into relatively pleasant, sometimes artificial Vanitas scenarios contemplating issues of materialism and mortality.
# The source of all specimens were meat markets and natural history exhibits.
Blow Up is a series of large-scale photographs of exploding floral arrangements by Ori Gersht. They are based upon a 19th Century still-life painting by Henri Fantin-Latour.
About the project:
Flowers, which often symbolise peace, become victims of brutal terror, revealing an uneasy beauty in destruction. This tension that exists between violence and beauty, destruction and creation is enhanced by the fruitful collision of the age-old need to capture “reality” and the potential of photography to question what that actually means. The authority of photography in relation to objective truth has been shattered, but new possibilities to experience reality in a more complex and challenging manner have arisen.
David LaChapelle knows a thing or two about beauty and transience after three decades of experience as a celebrity and fashion photographer. In his current exhibition Earth Laughs In Flowers he explores these themes by updating the Baroque tradition of still life painting.
About the project:
In this new series of ten works DAVID LACHAPELLE (Born 1964) explores the vanity of life and beauty. With titles such as “Springtime”, “Late Summer”, “Early Fall” and “Deathless Winter” the works refer to the four seasons and allude to the life cycle: from birth to death.
The title of the series is a quotation of the poem “Hamatreya” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, in which flowers are the earth’s laughter at the arrogance of human beings who believe they can rule the earth, although they themselves are transient and must return to it. The title of the exhibition can also be read in the sense of the Baroque vanitas portrayals. The meaning of the Baroque floral still life was always related to the human hubris and transience of earthly existence, with the classical still life often containing many of the following: flowers, fruits, vegetables, animals, insects, mask, candles, watches or skulls. These symbols denote the fugacity and limitations of human life and the meaningless nature of vanity. Just like wilting flowers, albeit their beauty, we will all fade away. Whilst LaChapelle shows an explicit compositional affinity to Baroque floral still life, he transfers the genre from painting to photography. The artist employs art historical visual traditions, but he also translates them into visual metaphor of and for our time. On second glance the viewer will discover objects of contemporary society in the blooming and fading flower arrangements: burning cigarettes, newspapers from yesterday, old mobile phones, plastic, Barbies, a Manga mask, medical devices, a burning American flag, a model of an airplane, balloons, tins, collages, throw away dinnerware or a tattered dollar bill. These are the metaphors of vanity in our era of an affluent though seemingly troubled society. The often bizarre and excessive symbolical imagery does not fail to remind us however, as in the traditional vanitas, to follow our virtues and to celebrate life before it‘s over.
These works will be on exhibit through March 24 at Robilant + Voena in Milan.
Selected work by Eiji Yuzawa
Selected work by Dennis Wojtkiewicz
About his work:
Ohio artist, Dennis Wojtkiewicz explores the sensitive nature of time in his oversized oil paintings of fruit and flowers. The transitory nature of his subject matter is encapsulated, transfixed and glorified with hightened photorealism. Light and translucence make these paintings glow. Nature’s perfect patterning allows each painting to take on a meditative quality.
In their photo series Bones, photographers Pauline Rochas and Carole Beaupré bring the same sensibility they learned shooting fashion and luxury products to deer bones.
La Lettre asked the artists about their project:
Their fascination is born out of the remains of death and what is left on earth after muscle, sweat, blood, air leaves a body. The photographs are oversized portraits of found pieces of bones from a single deer found in the Northeast area. Noting that deers often return to where they were born in order to die, Carole Beaupré & Pauline Rochas borrow subtext found in poems from famous English poets and how nature allows bones to communicate a history, a story, a life lived but living on, after death. Using bones to communicate their own stories of perfection, nature, womanhood, mother figures, angelic imagery and the welcoming of darkness in nature, the artists see how bones are often transformed into sculpture, objets d’art, jewelry, chandeliers, bookends and other utilitarian uses for human thirst of aesthetic consumption.
The large scale series of Bones photographed is an enduring subject in today’s juxtaposition of extreme dualities found in life and death, consumption and decay, nature and spiritualism — found in today’s modern culture.
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