Still life is one of the oldest genres in painting, but contemporary photography since the 1990s has renewed it as a critical form. By carefully photographing insignificant things — leftovers after a meal, household goods, commodities, fragments of the street — it makes visible consumption, desire, and the materiality of everyday life. This is the lineage Charlotte Cotton called “Something and Nothing” in The Photograph as Contemporary Art.
Photography that takes everyday objects and overlooked things as its subject, renewing still life as a critical genre of contemporary photography — the lineage Charlotte Cotton called 'Something and Nothing.'
What contemporary still life inverted was the hierarchy of what deserves to be photographed — the most modest things, leftovers and household goods, became critical subjects for reading consumption, desire, and time.
Still life has been a pictorial genre since seventeenth-century Dutch painting, and contemporary photography from the 1990s onward has quoted and reorganized it. Laura Letinsky photographs the fruit and tableware left on the table after meals with a large-format camera, referring to the compositions of Dutch still-life painting while establishing the time after desire and consumption as a photographic subject.*1 Takashi Yasumura precisely stages household objects and domestic space, unsettling our confidence in the reality of ordinary things.
In The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Charlotte Cotton described this lineage as “Something and Nothing” — the moment when nothing in particular becomes something.*2 The poetry Gabriel Orozco finds in everyday objects and Valérie Belin's hyper-precise descriptions of commodities and artificial things both question the relation between looking and valuing through attention to the insignificant.*3
This lineage also crosses photography's commercial vocabulary. Roe Ethridge redirects the still-life imagery of advertising and fashion into an art context, analyzing the grammar of commercial photography through juxtaposition and sequence.*4 Blommers & Schumm deliberately disturb the boundary between fashion photography and still life, slipping subtle dissonances into polished surfaces.
The renewal of still life showed that photography could be critical without depending on the decisive moment or on grand social subjects. Where staged photography questions photographic conviction by constructing scenes, contemporary still life builds its questions from the smallest unit: the relation between things and the gaze.
Adjacent lineages include Staged Photography, which questions photographic conviction through constructed scenes, Large-Format Color, which extends descriptive precision to scale, and Conceptual Art, which questioned the hierarchy of subjects itself. Reading those pages together shows how the everyday object became a critical subject in contemporary photography.*2
Canadian-born artist born in 1962, based in Chicago, known for still-life and domestic interior photography. Her work shifted from portraiture toward still life in the late …
Japanese photographer born in 1972 in Shiga and based in Tokyo. Known for photographs of domestic objects and landscapes that use scale, arrangement, and framing to complicate …
French artist born in 1964, known for photography that stages encounters between hyperreal description and artifice. Her practice moves across portrait, still life, body, luxury …
Mexican conceptual artist who records the latent poetry of everyday objects in photographs, working across sculpture, painting, and installation. Major works include La DS and …
Dutch photography duo, both born in 1969, who began working together shortly after graduating from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in the mid-1990s. They are important for …
American photographer born in 1969, known for mixing commercial, vernacular, and art-photographic image languages. His work became important in the 2000s as a challenge to the …