The Stillness of Things

What Makes It Great? / Featured / September 14, 2022

By Suzanne Révy

A dear friend gave me a hand-crafted ceramic batter bowl with a wooden whisk as a wedding gift. A few years after my wedding, I moved north and she moved south. Between our distance and the day-to-day of work and family obligations, we lost touch for a time. But I always felt the emotional resonance of our friendship when I would whisk up some pancakes in that bowl. We finally reconnected during a visit a few years ago, but achingly, she passed away after a long illness last year. That bowl has become more precious to me. Is it any wonder then that the still life, featuring objects that may linger with the residue of long lost loves, is one of the oldest traditions in the history of art and photography? The Stillness of Things, currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, explores affecting and innovative still life in photography through the history of the medium. It will be on view through February 27th, 2023.

“Articles of China” by William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800–1877) before 1844, Photograph, salt print from a paper negative, The Lane Collection, courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

” Butterfly” by Adam Fuss (English, born in 1961) 2002, daguerreotype photograph, The Lane Collection © Adam Fuss, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Culled from the museum’s Lane Collection by Lane Curator of Photography Karen Haas, The Stillness of Things is a lesson in the history of photography through the genre of still life. To illustrate the timespan, it opens with an image of an inventory of china by Henry Fox Talbot from 1844 alongside a contemporary Daguerrotype by Adam Fuss of a butterfly made in 2002. The early fascination with photography as a documentary medium during the Victorian era has given way to a wide range of expressive possibilities during modern and post-modern movements.

“Still Life” 1923 (top) and “Still Life” early 1920’s by Charles Sheeler, gelatin silver prints, installation photograph by Suzanne Révy.

“Water Lily” by Margrethe Mather (American, about 1885–1952), 1922, palladium print, The Lane Collection, courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

“Aloe Variagata” by Imogen Cunningham, early 1930’s, gelatin silver print, Lane Collection, installation photograph by Suzanne Révy.

Loosely organized by subject from messy desktops, kitchen utensils, and flora to empty chairs or found objects, the exhibit revels the mid-twentieth century strengths of the collection with works by modernists such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and especially Charles Sheeler. Sheeler pays homage to the painter Morandi with two still lifes featuring a simple ewer and ceramic vase and to Cezanne in a composition of apples. Often overlooked among the modernist masters are women such as Margaret Mather and Imogen Cunningham. Mather’s wispy pine needles and delicate water lily classically weave light, form and abstraction while Cunningham brings a geometric edge to the aloe plant she photographed on her window sill.

“Chair with Boots, Norfolk, Nebraska” by Wright Morris (1910-1998), 1947, gelatin silver print, The Lane Collection, installation photograph by Suzanne Révy

“Near Lone Pine, California” by Liliane de Cock (1939-2013), 1960’s, gelatin silver print, The Lane Collection, installation photograph by Suzanne Révy.

A palpable sense of absence can pervade still lifes, and Haas has included several images of chairs that seem to pine for their owners. The striking simplicity of photographer and essayist Wright Morris’s picture of boots on the seat of a chair by a door belies a charged poignance while Liliane de Cock, who was an assistant for Ansel Adams in the late ‘60s and early ’70’s, shares his fascination for desert light in a picture of a chair near Lone Pine, California. Perhaps most moving is Robert Frank’s pair of chairs photographed in the Tuileries Gardens of Paris as part of an album of romantic pictures made for his future wife.

“Chairs, Tuileries, Paris” by Robert Frank (1924-2019) 1949, gelatin silver print, The Lane Collection, installation photograph by Suzanne Révy.

“Gingko Leaves” by Irving Penn (1917-2009) 1990, dye-transfer print, The Lane Collection, installation photograph by Suzanne Révy.

Robert Frank’s chairs are deftly installed next to one of the few color images in the exhibit, Irving Penn’s Gingko Leaves, which also references a couple. As the wall label suggests, the photographs infer the absence of one person in the fresh leaf or upright chair, while the other is absent in the wilted leaf or folded chair. In a new experiment in curating, many of the wall labels for this exhibit were written by the museum’s teen Curatorial Study Hall and a variety of colleagues from other departments. In offering fresh context for the work, pictures become more accessible to general audiences, encouraging visitors to interpret the work in personal and instinctive ways.

“Artichoke” by Olivia Parker (American, born in 1941), 2010. digital inkjet print, The Lane Collection, © Olivia Parker 2010, courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

“Chicken Entrails” by Frederick Sommer (1905-1999) 1939, gelatin silver print, The Lane Collection, installation photograph by Suzanne Révy.

Olivia Parker’s green and purple artichoke dangling from a string is a nod to the Spanish painter Juan Sánchez Cotán whose vegetable paintings depict foodstuffs hung high to keep rodents at bay. Her work is installed near two surrealist pictures by Frederick Sommer. His jarring but beautiful compositions of chicken heads and innards brim with the tension between the life sustaining nourishment the chicken may have provided and the stark reminder of our mortality. And in an ironic twist, David Hilliard’s ebullient polyptych, Perennial, features an aisle of plastic Walmart flowers that were his mother’s favorites, in striking contrast to the ephemeral flowers featured in countless still life paintings in the galleries of the museum.