Abstract
The history of photography abounds with images of tables set for real and imagined guests, communicating both shared and personal experiences of home, labor, and possessions. Early photography required long exposure times, and therefore the tabletop still life was an ideal subject to celebrate life through collections of fine domestic and imported goods. In some of the first photographs ever made, William Henry Fox Talbot photographed his collections of China and glassware on tables set for breakfast or tea, almost always from the vantage point of a guest approaching the table, welcomed into an inner circle and aristocratic lifestyle. Such seductive “life-style” photography practices continue today in social media tablescapes, with their melding of image with the mobilizing of desires expressing class, consumer culture, gastronomy, and hospitality. The still life may also draw upon the Nature Morte or Vanitas genre of painting that reached a peak in popularity in Europe in the 17th century, communicating the transience and vanity of life. Understood in these contexts, contemporary photographers continue to renew the language of the still life, presenting the tabletop and dinnerware as a site of complex emotions, gendered experience, vulnerability, memory, and loss. Their images elicit the opportunity to rethink issues such as waste, food, incarceration, and fragile beauty, while embracing/questioning personal proclivities and social practices, in a thoroughly photographic means of presentation and re-presentation.
Presenters
Marcella HackbardtChair and Professor, Department of Art and Art History, Kenyon College, Ohio, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2025 Special Focus—The Art of Hospitality
KEYWORDS
History of Photography, Contemporary Photography, Photography, Dining Table, Table Settings
