But most still life photography straddles a magical boundary in which very real and tangible objects are so purposefully crafted into scenes that are almost a slice of life. Whether a single photograph can ever be a true act of nonfiction, I don’t have the time or space to explore here. The first is that some types of photography will never neatly fit into the binary categories of fiction and non-fiction, just as creative non-fiction plays that same game. I have also mused on two things with regard to the non-fiction nature of this type of photography: Over a long spring and summer during which I googled the fuck out of ‘how to take/create/edit painterly still life photographs’, and pushed myself to create as much as a working mum can, I got to a place of amateur understanding with the genre.
I have an obsessive nature, so naturally I obsessed. I didn’t appreciate how little I knew about this craft. I was rather stunned into disappointment when that first still life of mine looked like a pile of flaming crap (I deleted the pictures in a stroppy rage). If photography is a type of non-fiction, I was doing the equivalent of summative journal entries (with the odd poem in the margins). Up to this point, my camera had been a means of documenting life around me, in a fairly normal way – family photos, holiday views, and the occasional artsy snap. I eagerly put together my first still life in March of 2020, not many days after the start of the #IsolationCreation Instagram trend. This photographic movement picked up speed, and Instagram exploded with sumptuous celebrations of seasonality, flowers, and an Old World aesthetic that led to us all scouring antique stores and charity shops for props. Most (not all) of Beck’s photos were delicately displayed still life masterpieces, using whatever flora was growing around her locally, nestled into glassware or built stem-by-stem and leaf-by-leaf with an assortment of construction tricks (and, as we would all come to learn, a bit of Photoshop). It was the beginning of the #IsolationCreation series, and it unleashed unimaginable beauty into the world.
Faced with the cancellation of shows and jobs, she committed to a photo a day during lockdown. I think it really started with Jamie Beck, an American photographer living in Provence. It’s possible that some of us did that last activity more than others. In the first coronavirus lockdown of 2020, we became obsessed with washing our hands, sanitising our groceries, and arranging each and every individual petal in a stunning swell of blooming flowers into still life photographs, dabbing on dewy jewels of water with an eyedropper and balancing taxidermied insects precariously on buds and leaves.
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