Allen Schill
Still-Life Photography

Departures and Detours

This section offers a few items of possible interest, occasional subjects, photographed along with the more typical still-life photographs seen nearby on this site, but which simply didn't go well alongside them.  The subjects, and how I arrived at setting them up, are somewhat different from those of the still-life images, and so of course are the results.

Easiest to explain are the empty boxes and trays, usually seen in other photographs filled with arrangements of objects or materials.  In those photographs I took considerable trouble with the settings - comparable to how much I took with the choice and arrangement of objects.  Sometimes the boxes and trays were just what I wanted without any changes on my part.  Other times I wanted to change the background or surface so as to enrich it texturally as a counterpoint to the objects.  Still other times I found the surface too irregular or differentiated, and worked on it to make it more homogeneous.  Either way, I got what I wanted by painting or staining, or by scratching the surface with a tool or some abrasive.*

With all this work (and sometimes without any), the boxes themselves often became very alluring even when empty.  I may not have seen this so clearly when I was concentrated on the composition of the picture, but once or twice after finishing with a picture and emptying the tray of all material, I was struck by its luminosity, its luster, brought out by the soft light of my photographic set.  They were evocative, all by themselves and empty.  I just had to photograph them; it was an artistic imperative.  (Although I still used my multiple-focus technique, they were also technically easier to photograph than the still-life pictures.)  I don’t always agree that less is more (most of my other photographs will attest to that), but on these occasions it seemed that less was indeed more, or just as much, but different.  What does it all mean – something about emptiness or nothingness? Food for thought – maybe that’s the purpose, if not quite the meaning.

Anyway, two of these photographs (the Black Balloons Box and the Box for Medium Objects) are of the boxes used as settings for other photographs found nearby on this site.  Two others (Crate A and Crate B)) are followed, several pictures later, by the arrangements with the same trays filled with material.  For their part, those two images (Persimmons and Rose Hips) of which I had made preliminary versions a couple of years earlier) lie on the fringes of my more typical still-life photography in that they consist of many objects, or very many, and approach the textural images I’ve done over the years, another considerable body of work.

Three more, Germogli IIA, Germogli IIB, and Germogli IIC (not a set, though derived from the same subject), are hard-core textural photographs in turn derived from Germogli (Bean Sprouts in Drawer) nearby on the site.  That picture is a bit of a departure from my other still life; although it’s a drawer or shallow box, it is bright instead of dark, and it is filled with a pretty uniform distribution of material – green azuki beans sprouted and then arranged in the box – instead of a small or at least countable number of discrete objects.  I didn’t just get rid of that when I was done; I augmented it, sprinkling alfalfa seeds all over, and spraying it with water for several days to keep it humid and let the sprouts germinate.  I had a thick jungle of sprouts growing this way and that in the box.  I let it all dry out, then applied a few coats of diluted polyvinyl glue to finish it.  Finally I took the pictures:  a set for the entire box in one high-definition frame, then another (excluding the sides of the box and the shadowed area of the sprouts) for both the six-paneled image and the large assembly.

These rather minimalist images – whether of empty boxes or fields of uniform texture – may seem quite different from my usual stock-in-trade.  In fact they are, if only superficially.  More fundamentally, they also hope to elicit the same kind of state of mind that I try to evoke with still life.  As for the textural pictures, if they need any more reason to be than this, I should only mention again my long involvement with texture as a subject.  You can see the extent of this work elsewhere on this site, under Calligraphic Abstraction and Pulp and Acrylic Textural Pieces.  Elsewhere I have mentioned that in my first experience (at the age of seven or eight, I think) with a camera – a simple plastic 127, obtained for 50 cents and 30 Bazooka Joe comics – I took a few pictures of the grass at my feet, excluding any context.  Even then I just knew I had to do this, and maybe I even had an idea of why.

Another is an abstract sort of photograph of – what – a humble cutting board.  Even though the fact is completely incidental to the image.  I’ve always been fascinated by the visual evidence of ongoing processes, natural or artificial, and as this black plastic board became scarred and worn over the course of several years, I liked what was developing.  It was a readymade – not a readymade art object, like Duchamp’s urinal, but a readymade photographic subject.  Another is a photograph of a collage of cut-up old leather belts.  Honestly I’m not sure if the photo is the work, or the collage.  Yet another is of four roughly-textured wooden slats, perforated and scarred from their previous incarnation in a chaise longue.  There are also photographs of two plaster reliefs:  one cast from pistachio shells, the other from a collage of medicine blisters.  The collage itself is the subject of another photograph.  Again, I’m not sure which is the work – the original collage, on display in my house, or the photograph of it, or the photograph of the relief – I think maybe all three.  It gets complicated, but we needn’t worry about it.

In addition, there are a few more images of small objects with particular surfaces, which show a highly regular pattern.  In much of my past work (not only in photography but in painting and printmaking too) I've been powerfully drawn to regularity and repetition.  I've noticed also that many of my subjects are utilitarian in origin, but that the photographs take them completely out of context.  I do think about this at times - about why that should be -  but basically trust my instincts about what and how to photograph.

The sizes of the editions of these images are yet to be established, but will certainly not be more than ten signed and numbered prints of any size (whether A3Plus or native dimension), and possibly an artist's proof.

*During my MFA days at Lehman College, a painting professor of mine (the extraordinary Kent Floeter, who had a rather flip view of the tendencies in in modern painting during the 1970s), characterized as the “fetish finish” the work of the numerous artists who did large, almost monochromatic paintings with an intense interest in the texture of the painted surface.  (Kent is also the subject of an well-known painting by Chuck Close.)

© 2017 Allen Schill.  All rights reserved.  No part of this document may be reproduced or used without prior written permission from the author.  Anyone is welcome to link to it, or to quote brief passages, but I would like to be notified.