Allen Schill
Still-Life Photography

Sui Generis:  Still Life 1987-2001

A selection of still-life photographs made with the 4"x5" view camera, over a broad range of time (1987-2001), using a variety of approaches and ways of proceeding. 

The image "Grisaille" and several that follow it were created with the idea of grisaille technique, or the idea of the sort of imagery typical of grisaille, somehow in mind. Grisaille is the term for the paintings done all in grey for the wing panels of an altarpiece, which are seen only during Lent when the altarpiece is closed (thus concealing the full-color paintings usually on view with the altarpiece open). In many such panels, the illusionism of the picture is fortified by seeming to follow or incorporate the structure of the altarpiece itself, often by depicting the subject as if it were a sculpture or a real person positioned within a niche defined by the frame of the panel.

This is a notion that informs, in some small way, a great many of my still-life photographs, at least the ones which depict their subjects positioned within a niche-like box or other container, such as "Shields" or "Clay Head" in this group.  Their soft lighting is similar to that of the grisaille paintings of centuries ago.  (One of the greatest works I've ever seen in person is Joel-Peter Witkin's Crucifixion, a sculpture, which incorporated photographic panels at the extremities of the cross.)

Still, I wouldn't want to make too much of this point, as there is a lot more going on here than just the idea of drawing inspiration from one source in the history of art.

These images exist in limited editions of fifteen signed and numbered prints of any size and any type of print, whether traditional analog silver-gelatin prints or digital pigment prints.  They consist, in fact, principally of gelatin-silver prints (as they were made when I still routinely made traditional prints and had not yet adopted the use of a digital pigment printer), sized mainly to a format of 16" x 20" or 11" x 14".  Because I generally did not complete the editions in gelatin-silver, I have begun to fill them out with most images by making digital pigment prints in A3Plus, not to exceed a total of fifteen of any type of print.  That is, there are no multiple editions.  (Some artists engage in the deceptive practice of issuing an edition in a certain size, another edition in another size, etc., without being honest about what they are doing.)  For example, of "Late Delivery II" (id#639), I already have eleven signed and numbered gelatin-silver prints, and in recent years have made three digital pigment prints, so I can make only one more pigment print.

For an artist's statement regarding these images, see the last menu item in this section, "The Persistence of Memory - Still-Life Essay". 

© 2014 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.