Still life, or, in French, nature morte, is one of the staples of photography. In the earliest days, when exposures ran to many minutes, still life was easier to photograph than people, and it remains often easier to assemble the elements of a still life than to find a model for a portrait or nude study. Most importantly of all, a photograph of a still life can be a thing of beauty in its own right.
In the earliest days of photography, even photographers such as Henry Talbot who were often merely researching technical processes made superb still-life images, and Roger Fenton's still-life photographs of the 1840s are among the finest ever shot. One of the greatest decades in non-advertising still-life photography was the 1920s, when ‘abstract’ pictures enjoyed a great vogue: objects such as folded paper, light bulbs, cutlery, and much else were photographed as studies in line and form, without ‘content’ in the conventional sense. And one of the worst decades was the 1950s, with its craze for saccharine ‘table-top’ pictures of glass ornaments like dancing fauns. In the 1960s, still life all but disappeared, only to reappear in the late 20th century with the latest super-saturated colour films.
Still life for its own sake has often been surprisingly neglected by amateurs and even by art photographers: by far the greatest numbers of still-life images that one sees are advertisements. The main reason is probably the belief that still-life photographs are time consuming and difficult, and require a lot of space and equipment. But, as an examination of photo magazines reveals, this belief is wrong: those who shoot still life often use simple equipment, yet produce striking images.