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PHOTOGRAPHY · STILL LIFE · 2024
The brief was simply about demonstrating controlled lighting techniques, so I decided to build a still life that holds up to the formal language of 17th-century Dutch painting while being visually interpreted in a modern way. That meant constructing a scene with the same density, symbolic weight, and chiaroscuro lighting as the Old Masters, while keeping the work readable as contemporary editorial photography. Every element in the frame was sourced or built for the shoot, and the composition was built intentionally to showcase the frailty and fleeting preciousness of life.
The composition is anchored by a constructed banquet tableau. It features peonies and roses in deep plums and creams cascading over a green velvet drape, candle wax pooling on a candelabra, a halved artichoke, dark cherries in cut crystal, a brass skull, ripe apricots, and a hand-built ceramic eye-bowl marked with JLL Creative iconography. I sourced the florals, built the arrangement, threw and finished the ceramic vessel, and arranged each object by hand. The lighting was single-sourced and warm, set to recall Vermeer and Rembrandt, internal light, deep falloff, color held in the highlights, and surrendered to shadow at the edges.
A constructed scene at this scale and density offers many opportunities for things to go wrong. Florals wilt under hot lights, candle wax pools unpredictably, cut crystal throws unwanted reflections, and any one element going off draws the eye away from the composition. I worked the scene in passes, starting with broad passes before honing in and tightening detail areas. Tighter detail frames let me study surface qualities the wide shot can only suggest: dried rose petals on velvet, the soft fuzz of ripe apricots, the violet center of a halved artichoke catching the only available light.
Building a scene from scratch is a different discipline from capturing one. The work begins long before the shutter ever fires; first planning and ideating, then sourcing, constructing, and arranging every object in the frame. Lighting is the easy part once the composition reads as envisioned. This piece is part of an ongoing body of still life studies investigating how the formal language of Renaissance and Golden Age painting traditions translates into contemporary editorial photography.
