In March of 2020, as New York City of went into lockdown, like many others, I became an “artist-in-residence” in my own home.
A large drafting table next to windows in an upstairs room became the center of my photography as I began to work on a new series of still life photographs.
My initial inspiration came from 17th-century Dutch still life paintings. I was drawn to the quality of the light, which led to my decision to shoot only in natural light. I was also intrigued by the contrast between the beauty and lushness of the subjects and the underlying hints that what is pictured is just a fleeting moment in time. The objects I choose explore the qualities of light and the ephemeral nature of living things and their passage from freshness to fading, remnants, and regeneration. My images often include found objects, shells, bones, dried flowers, ephemera, and pieces with a family history.
One of the most important pieces is the drafting table, which is an element in every one of my still life photos. It belonged to my father. Some of my earliest memories as a three-year-old are of the table set up by the windows in the living room of our apartment. It’s a beautiful thing – a large solid oak top on a heavy wood trestle base, with a semi-circular metal ratchet that adjusts the tilt of the tabletop. Over the years, I watched my father work at this table. In art school, I spent hours seated at this table working on my drafting and calligraphy assignments. Now it’s mine, and it sits by the windows in the small upstairs room I use as my studio.
I have always come to photography with a painter’s eye and, six years into the project, I continue to take inspiration from many sources as I experiment with different ways of composing still life photos. In many ways, it’s all about the light. The windows face the front of the house and get sunlight from early afternoon until sunset. I typically photograph on and off during the day, tracking the light as it changes. During the winter and into early spring, when the trees are bare, the room gets bright sunlight, which lends itself to high-contrast compositions of shadow and light with bright reflections. As the tree right outside my window fills out during summer, the color of the light changes, and at certain times of day, the light becomes filtered, softer, and sometimes very fleeting. At other times of day, there are rectangles of sunlight on the floor, which led me to try a new perspective by putting background material on the floor and shooting from overhead.
When I began the series during the COVID lockdown, I simply used the tabletop to set up the objects for each set of photos. Later, as the series progressed, I expanded my view to take advantage of the geometry of the windows and the table as elements in the framework of the composition. I returned to photography after a long career working with architectural firms in New York City as a designer specializing in materials and finishes. Now I use the experience I gained developing color palettes to select the objects and materials that I assemble for each set of photographs.
The Still Life project has become a meditation on the nature of cycles, seen through an exploration of light, shadow, transparency, and reflections. The daily and seasonal cycle of the sun and the seasonal changes in the light, as the trees in front of my windows bud, leaf, and change color, have become an integral part of each set of photographs. [Official Website]
