The art of arrangement and capturing life on film

THESE days anyone can pick up a camera and take an interesting photograph. But while the digital age has undoubtedly transformed the whole process, photography is still a craft where skills are honed and perfected.

It is a craft celebrated in an impressive exhibition at the National Media Museum in Bradford. Art of Arrangement: Photography and the Still Life Tradition, which runs to February 10, explores the still life genre and its themes and influence on photography.

Still life is often associated with great artists like Rembrandt, Velazquez and Gauguin, but it has also inspired generations of photographers who have been beguiled by its striking imagery and dark symbolism, focusing on decay and the fleeting nature of existence. As well as featuring traditional still life in paintings and photographs, Art of Arrangement includes works from photojournalism, documentary, advertising, fashion photography and contemporary video art installations.

It features 150 works by some of the biggest names in photography such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Dorothea Lange, Edward Steichen, Roger Fenton, Don McCullin and James Jarché.

Greg Hobson, curator of photographs at the museum, says the exhibition spans practically the entire history of photography.

“It goes from very early photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot right up to images from the present day.”

He says it uses traditional still life as a starting point and shows how photographers have taken this and refigured it. “Many photographers have explored still life and numerous classic images are included in this exhibition, but we also hope to surprise people with works that have tapped into the conventions of the genre, perhaps without realising it.”

The exhibition shows how far photography has come since the early pioneers started out in the mid 19th -century. “When Fox Talbot was working on his new, inventions he was working in his house by candlelight and if he wanted to speak to fellow photographers he had to write a letter that was picked up and transported by horse and carriage, he couldn’t just send an email,” says Hobson.

“Harold Edgerton’s high-speed photograph from the 1950s of a bullet passing through a piece of fruit would have been impossible 100 years earlier because back then exposure took several minutes.”

Mortality is another key, and recurring, theme in the exhibition. “It runs through the still life tradition and things like birds, insects and-fruit are popular subject matter because they will decay and they become metaphors for our own fleeting lives. As a motif it crops up time and again and often in interesting and unexpected ways.”

Art of Arrangement: Photography and the Still Life Tradition runs to February 10.

Photography and still life

The exhibition features 150 works dating from the 1840s to the present day.

As well as photographs, the exhibition includes two videos. Ori Gersht’s Pomegranate (2006), a film of a bullet passing through the fruit, is influenced by a 17th century painting by Juan Sanches Cotan and Harold Edgerton’s photography. A second Gersht film, Falling Bird (2007), is based on a painting by still life master Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin.

Among the modern artists whose works are displayed include Chris Killip, Jem Southam, Hannah Starkey, Taryn Simon, Simon Norfolk, Luc Delahaye and Sarah Jones.