I’ve been puzzling over the definition of “still life.” As best I can tell, a still life is an arrangement of objects that are not alive, as “alive” is commonly understood. A portrait of a person is not a still life. A landscape image of a forest is not a still life, but an arrangement of branches, leaves, pine cones, and other objects from the forest is still and can be arranged into a still life.

All this seems a bit arbitrary. If you include a dead dragonfly, the resulting composition can still be considered a still life, but if your pet cat is captured moving through the image it is arguably no longer still.

I’ve been puzzling over this—as befits someone whose logician father drummed into him early the importance of semantics—but I think the key point is not the terminology but rather the active arrangement. As with my high-key light box work, the key step is choice of the objects and creating the patterns and flow of the arrangement, not the capture of the resulting image. 

With a still life, the photographer has complete control of everything: the objects, how they are placed, the lighting, and so on. This is in contrast to every other kind of photography. In portraiture or model photography there is a collaboration with the (hopefully interactive) subject. In landscape photography, as Ansel Adams once noted, sometimes he is in the right place at the right time to make a great photo. The trick is to be there, to get the location and position right, and to recognize the moment, but you don’t get to “arrange” monumental mountains or the roar of the waves.

Arguably, the still life is the most individualistic of all the genres of photography, where one can most directly express one’s personality rather than capturing a slice of the existing world.

The other day, Jaime, a neighbor and friend, invited me to a collaborative still life photography session in his backyard. Jaime, Jessica, and I created and photographed our still life compositions. Great fun! The driftwood shown in these still life compositions, including the piece that looks rather like a large ginger root, is from Jaime’s ongoing collection of still life artifacts, mostly collected (I think) on California’s beaches.