[00:00:00] Speaker A: Good morning, everyone.
On behalf, my name is Marshall McKnight and on behalf of the Adult Education Committee here at Nassau Presbyterian Church, welcome. We are so glad to see you and we're so happy you joined us for this very special presentation this morning.
We have been blessed by Ned Walthall this week who has tied in a two week series with ARM in Army and has been raising funds through his beautiful artwork which is available for sale right over there in the gallery.
I pointed with my microphone. Not a good idea. There are five left and you can run right over there anytime. Even while Ned is speaking. Feel free to run over there and make the purchase. All proceeds go to ARM in Army, which is, as many of you know, our partner in fighting hunger in Mercer county and beyond.
So I will introduce Ned in a moment, but first, let's pray. Please pray with me.
Gracious and holy God, thank you for this gift of time together.
Thank you for the friends with us here today and for those listening later.
Thank you for our talented friend, Ned Walthall, who is willing to share his time and artistry with us. We thank you for ARM in ARM who help us feed the hungry. We ask that you make your presence known to those who woke up hungry this morning and help us feed them. In Christ's precious name, we pray. Amen.
Ned Walthall is a photographer based in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. He holds an MFA from the Institute of Art Design at New England College and has exhibited his work in galleries and photography centers across the United States and internationally. His work can be
[email protected] and on Instagram @walthallphotography and has been featured in Lenscratch, including his Post Pandemic series on Grand Central Terminal.
And I promised that I wouldn't describe him as the Photography Quad God. So let me just introduce him by saying he is not the Photography Quad God.
Ned Walthall, please give a warm welcome.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Thank you very much.
Maybe I should go over here.
So I'm going to talk.
I'm going to try to Talk for about 30 minutes and then we'll have questions at the end. I'm going to ask you to hold your questions until the end because I'm going to do something probably which may not be wise.
I'm going to try to cover about 300 years of art in 30 minutes.
So I'm going to have to talk a lot. And then at the end, basically I'll take any questions you have.
So the title of this talk is Still Life. It's not about you until it is.
I want to start with this painting, I didn't bring the wrong side bank. That's intentional. I want to start in talking about what still life isn't.
Still life is not this for several reasons. First, still life typically contains no humans.
This painting is packed with humans. Second, there's a lot of action. The story is from Matthew 9:11 as Jesus 9:11 reads. As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector's booth. Follow me, he told him. And Matthew got up and followed him.
Caravaggio, the painter here, has taken some liberties.
He makes this look like a mob hit, sort of. But apparently Matthew, the tax collector, is sitting at the table with some assistance counting the money. And Matthew appears to be pointing to himself in a kind of you talking to me gesture.
And he looks shocked at first, but still he has one hand on the coins on the table.
The light falling on Matthew's face suggests this is a moment of grace. And for Matthew, of course, it is.
In the next verse, we find Jesus having dinner at Matthew's house with other ne' er do wells and sinners.
Point is, everything in this painting is charged with theological and moral significance. It is a history painting, a narrative tells a story that to its intended audience would have massive significance. Right?
And the third thing here is that this painting is large. One of the problems with looking at paintings on the Internet is you really don't get a sense of how big they are. This painting is 10ft by 11ft, right?
There's not a still life in the world that basically is that big unless you're dealing with murals.
So the question really becomes, We all know Caravaggio's painting is basically not a still life.
The huge question, the bigger question is what happens to paintings and photographs when we kick out the humans?
How do these pictures then function?
What kind of significance can they have? How do they go about meaning, well, anything or another way to put it, were they ranked at the bottom of all the genres by the French Academy simply because they were pretty pictures that didn't mean much? And I think by way of answering that, I'm going to. Basically, by way of answering this, I want to read you something from a book, a wonderful book by a guy named Norman Bryson called.
It's entitled Looking at the Overlooked Four Essays on still Life Painting.
Still life takes on the exploration of precisely what the significance of. Of historical painting tramples underfoot. I'll read that again. Still life takes on the exploration of precisely what the significance of historical painting tramples underfoot. It attends to the world, ignored by the human impulse to create greatness.
Its assault on the prestige of the human subject is therefore conducted at a very deep level.
The human figure, with all of its fascination, is expelled narrative. The drama of greatness is banished, and what is looked at overturns the standpoint on which human importance is established.
Still life is unimpressed by the categories of achievement, grandeur, or the unique. The human subject that it proposes is anonymous outside the frame of the picture, cut off from the splendor and from singularity.
All men and women must eat the greatest and least among them in still life. In the absence of a specific human figure, there's a leveling of humanity, a humbling of aspiration before an irreducible fact of life, hunger.
That's what still life is about.
So let's look at some still lifes.
This is Chardin still Life with Plums, 1730.
It hangs in the Frick, by the way, in New York. You can see this painting. It's about, I don't know, 2ft by 2ft.
We have plums on the left, squashes on the right, a jug and a glass of water in the center.
There's something lovely and very radical about this painting, and it's refusal to apply any logic to the arrangement of these objects other than their form.
There's no human narrative here. Martha Stewart is not going to enter from the left and give us a recipe for baked plums and squash.
Right?
The plums are fresh, really fresh, freshly picked and utterly gorgeous. You can eat them now, but what are you going to do with the squash after?
And if you want to change the water into wine here, good luck with that. Jesus is nowhere to be found, nor any of the wedding guests. What we do find is Chardon's extraordinary use of light, the amazing texture he creates with his brush, and his brilliant depiction of reflection on the bottle.
In the absence of any human narrative, the painting necessarily becomes about color, form, shape, texture. It resists the idea that any narrative or moral issue can be derived from it.
Chardon was, after all, French, but I could be wrong about that.
To borrow a phrase from the New Testament, Chardon is insisting that it is by grace that these objects are saved, not by works. The squash, the plums, the bottle don't need anything other than what they are, don't need to be anything other than what they are to remind us of the value of finding and contemplating beauty in the ordinary details of our lives, which may be as much a sign of grace as the light in Caravaggio's. The calling of St. Matthew.
John Updike once described his fiction as giving the mundane its beautiful dew.
That's precisely what Chardon is doing here. Nothing more, nothing less.
This is Clara Peters, about a century earlier, born around 1589, an utterly remarkable Dutch painter, famous, among other things for painting still lifes in a genre called obitjes. I think I'm sorry for I cannot pronounce Dutch.
It's translated roughly as breakfast pieces.
The idea was to show what relatively prosperous Dutch citizens were eating for breakfast at the time, which seems to be about 15 pounds of cheese with some cherries and artichokes. Makes you wonder a little bit about the cardiovascular health of the average Dutch citizen in 1625.
Actually, you can see this painting at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art if you ever get out to California.
But there's something present here that is not present in Chardon.
These objects aren't simply arranged to show off their formal beauty as objects. There's a sort of culinary coherence here. This is breakfast. And while no human figure is present, someone has been here and consumed a cherry and maybe a little bit of artichoke and some cheese, maybe a lot of cheese. I wouldn't go so far as to call this narrative, but humans, while not visible, are more present in this picture, closer to stage left or right than in Chardon. They needed breakfast, they ate, and their presence introduced an element, in this case a very slight hint of impermanence in the seed of the cherry. Right.
The Dutch, during their 17th century Renaissance did not invent still life per se, but they invented the term.
They thought a lot about still life and went so far as to invent subgenres. We just saw one breakfast pieces, and this is an example of another, which is translated roughly as banquet pieces. This is by Wilhelm Kleitz heide, painted in 1635.
And this picks up and amplifies considerably the theme of human presence and impermanence that is barely touched on in Peter's work. The painting is wonderful in its detail, but it reflects a bit of Dutch Calvinist anxiety about mortality, impermanence and the perils of living in a sinful world.
Norman Bryson, whom I quoted before, refers to this kind of scene as a still life of disorder, in which affluence is presented as a dilemma, a crossroads between harmony and disharmony.
There are several details here that are ominous.
There are overturned dishes, some broken glass.
Note how the pewter plates and half peeled lemon hang precariously on the edge of the table. The snuffed candle, of course, implies mortality.
The mince pie would have been considered a rare delicacy, but it's only half consumed, while virtually all the oysters, which then, as now, are thought to be aphrodisiacs, have been eaten. And the bread here, perhaps suggesting the bread of life, lies untouched.
Are there any humans visible here?
[00:14:12] Speaker A: No.
[00:14:13] Speaker B: But the objects they have left behind create a sense of the revelry, of the revelry the now absent humans may have been engaged in.
This is as close to narrative as still life can get without inviting human figures back into the room.
The entire painting serves as forensic evidence for something we're not sure we want to know about.
We've come full circle from the serenity of Chardon's fruit and squash to a world whose disorder starts to raise questions about the moral and philosophical significance that are more conventionally dealt with in narrative painting.
But what happens when, 200 years later.
Sorry about the jump. What happens when, 200 years later, photography suddenly appears? And further complicates the role of. Of still life as the reflection of either human absence or, by indirection, its presence?
It's not hard to guess. The first thing photographers do is slavishly imitate painting.
One of the earliest photographs Fox Talbot makes.
There were two people working at the same time developed photography in the 1840s. One was, of course, Daguerre, who made the daguerreotype working in France, and Henry Fox Talbot, who was working in England. One of the earliest photographs Talbot makes in 1845 is a lovely still life. This is a big technological achievement and it makes a certain amount of sense.
Shutter speeds were not fast enough to freeze motion until the 1870s, so anything you photographed had to be still, which meant basically architecture, landscape, portraiture. And if you can get your subject to sit still. If you can get your subject to sit still. And of course, still life.
But from a still life perspective, aesthetically, there's a big problem.
Right, no color.
Sorry, no color.
There were.
Sorry again. Let me.
Hold on here.
Here we go. Okay, here we go.
There were some early processes that made color possible, but color photography really did not become widely available until Kodak introduced Kodachrome as early as 1936.
But the other problem was modernism.
Yes, modernism.
Modernism as a movement, argued that any artistic medium must be true to itself by exploiting its own indigenous strengths and subjecting itself to its own indigenous sort of constraints. The best example of this is painting. Of course, painting occurs on a flat surface.
If you're going to paint on A flat surface, then your painting needs to be in two dimensions, because that's what painting is about. If you want to forget Albertian perspective, vanishing point, the illusion of three dimensions on a two dimension surface, that's all fake.
So if you want to paint, your painting needs to be in two dimensions.
If you want to work in three dimensions, become a sculptor.
Well, the same problem was sort of applied essentially to photography. Alfred Stieglitz, who was usually influential among American photographers in the first half of the 20th century, applied this logic to photography. Photography had to become an aesthetic, an artistic medium that was unique to itself, that had indigenous characteristics that distinguished it from any other art form, including, of course, painting. You can use photography to make a still life, but a still life photograph needs to look like a photograph, not a painting.
So what is it that photographs are good at, that paintings are not?
And the answer was.
The answer was that photographs have a unique capacity to show the objects as they truly are, not as we imagine them, not as we perceive them, not as we arrange them, but as they actually exist in the real world in extraordinarily accurate detail.
So still life in the first half of the 20th century began to look like this.
This allegedly is what a pepper looks like.
Note the emphasis on line, form, structure, the play of light and shadow that accentuates these elements. And of course, no color, because even if it had been available to Weston in 1930, he would not have used it.
Color was for painters. Black and white was typically something that photographers could do better than painters.
And so all still life photographers in the first half of the 20th century, in effect became formalists. You know the old joke about economists where in a depression, economists say, we're all.
You know, I can't remember the joke.
We're all keen. I'm sorry, we're all Keynesians now.
Well, in the 1930s, photographers might have. Well, thanks to Stieglitz, thanks to modernism, photographers might well have said to themselves, we're all formalists. Now, this is a photography, often referred to as straight photography, that is as much interested in form and shape, if not more so, than in the objects it actually represents.
We are now back in a world in which human presence, though it might be vaguely implied, is, for all practical purposes, fully expunged.
And I'll just give you some quick examples. We all think, of course, of Ansel Adams as the great landscape photographer, but Ansel Adams did do some still lifes, and you get the idea. This is Fork by Paul Strand, Paris, 1928. This is bowl with Sugar cubes. By Andrew Karitz in 1928.
This is my kitchen sink by Imogen Cunningham, 1947. And you'll notice something has changed a little bit here as we reach the mid century. It's no surprise that Cunningham, one of the few women in this group, actually developed a form of still life that was unique to photography as a medium without reverting to a completely abstract, vaguely lifeless formalism. Notice she inserts herself into the photograph. It's my kitchen sink. And in fact, by mid century, still life photography, still black and white, still very formalist in its orientation, begins to pick up on themes of mortality and impermanence, excessive consumption that characterized the Dutch Renaissance 300 years before, which is actually kind of remarkable. I can't say enough about this photograph. I mean, Cunningham is just amazing.
Notice the fruit in the back. It's how she pushes it back into the channel. Sort of like she's waving by to Chardon, you know, see you later, you know, I mean, and the way she handles light. The photograph is as sharp and as precise and as, quote, straight as any photograph by Weston or anybody else. But it brings humans kind of back into the picture.
This is the Empty Plate by Irving Penn.
We can see all the formal elements of straight photography in Penn's photograph. It checks all of those boxes, but it raises fundamentally human questions. The empty plate implies abundance by envisioning it as having been entirely consumed.
What are we to think of the person who sat here? Were they gluttonous or desperately hungry or both at the same time?
And in our hunger for the world's pleasures, are we ever truly fed?
Or do we always end up staring at another empty plate?
And in 1980, Irving Penn again, God love him, even in black and white, brings us full circle back to Wilhelm, Klaus, Hedda and the still life of disorder.
This is called spilled cream. Of course, as you can see, once again, artists are starting to think about impermanence, even in the context of the stillness of still life.
So where is still life photography now?
In 2018, Ophelia Parker published a work entitled Vanishing in Plain Sight, A Journey Into Alzheimer's.
In it, she used still life, among other photographic genres, to explore and recount the loss of her husband John to Alzheimer's. John died in 2016.
We began by talking about the absence of humans in still life, their being in various senses, expelled.
Here, Parker has brilliantly used that convention to accentuate John's gradual disappearance from her own life.
In one series, she created a series of photographs of the notes John would keep in his wallet. To try to assist him in remembering things.
About this photograph, she writes, called. It's entitled Baseball, hot dog, airplane. About this photograph, she writes, I've included one note stack sequence imagining the disappearance of information in John's mind.
Baseball, hot dog, airplane.
Those are the three words John's doctor would ask him to remember for 20 minutes at a time.
And this is called Time by Parker, which he produced in 2017.
About this image, Parker writes, alzheimer's patients are often asked to draw the face of a clock.
As the disease progressed, John's mental image of a clock blurred and shattered.
It seemed as though any attempt to put it together again would only muddle it more.
Still life.
It's not about you until it is.
Thank you very much. I'll take questions.
[00:25:51] Speaker A: Thank you, Ned. That was a lot of food for thought.
You can't blame those groans on the oysters, can you?
We see a hand raised.
[00:26:09] Speaker B: So, Ed, I was struck by the idea that Kodachrome was 1936, and yet they continued black and white, or at least you continued to show black and white a genre as. As the medium.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: Was there a movement toward color that
[00:26:29] Speaker B: revolted against the black and white African? Yeah, very much so.
The first, but it was late and it was well after Kodachrome was developed. The first.
There were two major shows at the Museum of Modern Art in color that occurred in the 1970s. One was by a guy named Stephen Shore, and it was kind of a disaster. People hated it. And the other was by a very major American photographer still alive, named William Eggleston. Eggleston worked exclusively in color and was really discovered by the curator at MoMA, David Szarkowski, around maybe the mid-70s. And Szarkowski saw his work and said, I'm gonna show this, and did a major one person show of Eggleston's work which involved really deep and extraordinarily rich color.
Eggleston really understood the chemistry of color and really understood color, and it was a smash.
And at that point that really changed because up until that point, photographers really resisted color a lot. There were major photographers like Harry Callahan and others who were basically experimenting with color at places like risd. But it's simply. But there was that sense because modernism had taken hold. And the idea was that photography has to be unique to itself and true to itself. And painters paint in color and photographers do black and white, and real photography was in black and white. But shortly after that, there was another rebellion.
Modernism died. I don't know if you read the papers, but it's been buried 1970s, right in what we now think of as the postmodern era, photographers in the late 70s, early 80s really rose up and said, we're going to be like painters.
We're going to compete head to head with painters. We're going to make really big photographs, we're going to invent stuff and we're going to work in color. They're guys like, these are people, if you want to look them up. People like Jeff Wahl, Philip Lorca de Courcia and many others. And the idea was photography had become a collectible. Up until that point, works of photographic art really weren't sold.
But there developed a market for photography as a fine art. And so Sotheby and Christie's was actually starting to sell and art photographers actually began to make a living. Up until that point, up until the mid-70s, people like Walker Evans and anybody you could name, Imogen Cunningham, all those guys were like shooting for magazines, shooting commercially. They needed a day job to make ends meet. And so from that point on, from about the 80s on, color became a big deal. And of course, this was enhanced by. By digital photography as well.
Well, serious photographers would have resisted it. But the interesting thing is there was a movement. For example, Gary Winogrand, the famous street photographer, actually was shooting Kodachrome slides in the 1960s. He just didn't tell anybody and he sort of hid it because he didn't want to be known as a color photographer.
But he did amazing work and it was amazing, but the chemistry was hard.
A Sure. A. I love your photos.
Oh, thank you.
I want to ask about focal plane in photo distinct from painting and make a pitch that things like the paintings of a whole banquet scene, in a way unlike photos, can be a more realistic representation of your visual experience because you can move around and focus on different things at different times.
Photos on yours are a single focal plane, are they not? Everything's sharp, but you don't have a whole table worth of stuff. Yeah, yeah. So is there a way in a photo to have a moving plane of focus? The way way is true in vision and is true in paintings. You have to be a cubist.
No, I mean, I think that's kind of a limitation. You're right. That's kind of a limitation of photography.
It is a still medium.
And so, you know, unless you want to do.
Unless you want to do multiple exposures. Right. Or things like that, which would give you a kind of cubist look. Remember what cubists were doing was like Picasso and stuff didn't last long, but what cubists were doing was saying, okay, if my painting has to be flat and I have to be constrained by two dimensions, then I'm just going to take that third dimension and smack it down, right? And so what cubists were really trying to do was inside of that very narrow frame, God love them, was to include and incorporate multiple perspectives, right?
That would be very hard to do with a photograph. And of course, what kind of killed Cubism was that? Film came along.
I mean, motion pictures came along and the amazing ways in which you can manipulate point of view in motion pictures. And it sort of made cubism sort of look quaint and silly, right? I mean, well, I mean, there are all these ways in which you can do this.
And photographers like Man Ray did a lot of.
A lot of surreal stuff and a lot of multiple exposure stuff. And so we experimented with that. But I think you're right.
I want to go back to what you were saying because I think if you look at these Dutch still lifes, these are really photorealistic. I mean, I can't make a photograph this good.
Wouldn't even try, right? It's extraordinary.
It's like if she were painting now, we'd call this photo. We call this, quote, photorealism, right?
So,
[00:32:54] Speaker C: Ned, thank you so much. I really appreciate you sharing about how still life both is reference to the absence of humans and also the implied presence of humans. And I'm wondering about, in your own show, for I was Hungry, how you
[00:33:12] Speaker B: brought humans with you into the, the
[00:33:15] Speaker C: process outside of yourself.
[00:33:18] Speaker B: Oh, I was afraid you'd ask that question.
All of you know, I've actually shown other work here to you guys, like in street photography in Grand Central Terminal. Some of you are familiar with. You can see
[email protected] if you, if you want to. And so I started working on still life about a couple, actually maybe a couple years ago.
Not on this project per se. I've been working on this project for about a year.
And so I had to teach myself sort of how to do still life.
And one of the things I discovered was just how hard it is if you want to teach yourself. If you want to teach yourself how to do a new kind of photography or a new genre, if you want to understand a genre, like you want to understand history painting, make a history painting. If you want to understand a still life, make a still life.
Because in the process of doing that, you really all of a sudden realize how complicated it is, right? And one of the things that's weird about still life Is that is exactly what I was talking about. And Chardon really taught me this.
Like, you know, Shanann says there's a wonderful painting of Chardonnay with. There's a coffee pot, a garlic, a clove of garlic and a dead flower.
And you're sitting there, and he's thinking, well, I'm going to make coffee, and then I'm going to put garlic in it, and I'm going to stir it with this flour. Right, right. I mean, Chardon sort of has this radical notion of not making sense, which basically means that what you have to do is simply focus on the objects.
I think what happens to some extent in the work in there is I was very much influenced by that. In other words, because you immediately run into this sort of existential crisis, which is like, where do I put the mango?
And is there going to be a mango?
And is there going to be a pomegranate? And now there's a mango and a pomegranate, and where do the mango and pomegranate.
It becomes very.
Actually, those are big questions.
But there's something about.
And obviously I'm a big fan of Charlotte. There's something about what Charlotte does that I think is extraordinarily comforting. And I found it extraordinarily comforting at the time I was making these photographs, which is that in some sense, Chardonn's paintings sort of say, just stop.
You know, just stop.
Someone. Bryson, in his book, talks about the idea of still life, embraces the idea of so what?
Like, someone is telling you a story. Don't do this at home, don't do this with your partner or your spouse. But someone is telling you a narrative or a story that's really important to them, and you look at them and you say, so what?
That's not good for relationship.
But that works. I mean, with Chardon, what does Payne say to you is someone runs into the room and says something about Trump, and you say, so what?
Because I'm going to look at these objects and I'm going to be in this space.
And in that sense, that's what making those pictures kind of did for me at the time I was making them.
[00:36:49] Speaker C: Yeah, you have me thinking about genres in a new way. And I'm thinking of one artist in particular, Georgia o', Keeffe, who clearly did still lifes, but also did landscape. That's more contemporary, and, I mean, a wide variety, I think, of genres.
Would you just comment on artists making the transition from doing the traditional kinds of things they did into still life? Which it seems to me, Georgia o' Keeffe did in a way.
[00:37:26] Speaker B: Yeah. I think.
Well, it's no coincidence that she and Stieglitz were very tight, you know, I think.
And I wouldn't describe her work as photographic, but I do think there are elements of what Steglitz was doing with photography. You can see. And so that sense of. Look at Weston's pepper, right. There's some of. You know, there is a little bit of that in her work, for sure. And, you know, and Stieglitz was just an incredibly powerful, overwhelming, total guy.
So if you're going to hang out with Stieglitz, you're going to get a lot of Stieglitz, like drinking from a firehouse. Right.
But I suspect that worked in the other way because he was hugely impressed with her work. No question about it.
Well, I think if you look at all of the guys I showed you, Paul Strand, Weston, Ansel Adams, certainly. Right. Were all doing other things than still life.
Adams didn't think much of still life.
He described it as practice.
He used it as tonal practice for working with the chemistry of his black and white.
But Weston and those guys and Cunningham especially, were really, were very interested in. So Weston was doing a lot of nudes, a lot of portraits, a lot of landscapes, too.
But I think they were really trying desperately to understand photography because what was happening in photography at the time, time was that. And what was happening in that entire age was the sense of, how can we be true to this medium?
How can photography be different from painting? You can see the problem with Talbot. Right. The moment you look at that picture.
And Stieglitz, that was called pictorialism. And Stieglitz would go, no, I mean, it's drove him crazy.
So everybody at that particular point in history was worried about their genre, was worried about what they were doing, was worried about their medium.
That's pretty much gone.
So now I think it's probably more fluid.
Sure.
[00:39:56] Speaker C: Right away, I could understand looking at this picture, thinking of Trahune's orchards.
They're making nut chocolate nut bread with cranberries.
And it's right there in the picture,
[00:40:12] Speaker B: just coming right at your face.
Shout out to Teryun.
There are Teryun apples in those pictures, which for $150 contribution to Arm Arm, you can have on your wall. Right. But, yeah, I love Troyune, great source of still life.
[00:40:34] Speaker C: And their little twist. Twisters.
[00:40:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:40:37] Speaker C: Is the roundabout.
[00:40:38] Speaker B: And it goes.
[00:40:39] Speaker C: Curls up, down, but it closes the bread, so it's not going to get stale.
[00:40:44] Speaker B: So I could go on and on
[00:40:45] Speaker C: and on with each thing there.
[00:40:47] Speaker B: Great.
[00:40:47] Speaker C: But I know somebody else wants something else to say.
[00:40:52] Speaker A: Ned, great presentation.
[00:40:54] Speaker B: Is this a commentary also on time?
Oh, yeah. Oh yeah, for sure.
I think certainly what's interesting about the Dutch, and I think it might be that they're Calvinists. The Dutch are very anxious. The Dutch have become, you know, they've become an extraordinarily powerful country.
There were Catholics at the time too, but.
But the reform guys, I mean, this was.
They'd become extraordinarily powerful. They were doing international trade and they were rich, they'd gotten rich.
And so I think in those paintings you see a lot of worry about the nature of this abundance and the fact, and a lot of worry about mortality and a lot of worry about impermanence and decay and, you know, and all of that stuff.
And I didn't use those because I don't like them as much. But there's all a genre, you know, in still life called vanitas, where people will sort of plant a skull in the middle of the table. I think it's like it goes a little far for me.
I like the more subtle stuff, like the occasional seed or the pit that someone has left behind.
But that's all over Dutch Renaissance painting.
I mean, there's a lot. And that is still very much around even now in contemporary photography. There are contemporary still life photographers that make photographs that really you don't want to look at, that really address the issue of sort of carnality and decay and that sort of stuff.
But time is a big part of that time in the sense of it being short for us. Right? For sure.
[00:42:56] Speaker C: Ned. There is a narrative that photographers are agents of death and that they are always capturing something which in the imagery constantly reminds us of human finitude.
[00:43:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:43:12] Speaker C: However, if in your comparison of Imogene Cunningham's photograph, which shows the fruit in the background and the change in the foreground, in the sense of my self expression, I think in that respect there's a counter narrative about photographers. I mean, Imogene Cunningham photographed Martha Graham.
[00:43:40] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:43:41] Speaker C: And you know, that's where the photographer comes in as seeing the change, seeing the new thing in other art forms in addition to photography itself.
And so Martha Graham was breaking all sorts of ideas about dance and she removed the toe shoe and she was avant garde, right? Yeah, yeah. And so Imogene Cunningham saw that and said, no, this is life.
Just like Martha Graham herself was saying, no, this is life.
Focus on life, don't focus on what is past.
But move from the past into the future.
[00:44:25] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I think that's true. I think Imogene Cunningham is famous. Well, actually, she's not famous for this, but she said, my favorite quote by photographer ever when she was asked by a reporter, what is your favorite photograph? Meaning the one that she's one of hers. What's your favorite photograph?
The photograph you most like that you've taken.
And she said, the one I'm going to take tomorrow.
That.
That is a true response from a photographer. Right. I mean, that is what, you know, that's what photographers do.
They worry about.
The moment you take a photograph, it's, like, done.
And you're constantly thinking about, what am I going to do next? Right. I think that's true. And I think that's really. That really shows in her work. For sure. That's a great point.
[00:45:27] Speaker C: You're a great photographer and a great lecturer.
[00:45:31] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:45:36] Speaker A: Let's give another big hand for Ned Walthor.
[00:45:38] Speaker B: Thank you very much.
[00:45:44] Speaker A: Thank you, Ned, for that powerful and beautiful presentation. To see more of the artwork in this series in person, please stop in our gallery.
The gallery is nearly sold out. There are a few left. All proceeds go to arm in arm. And next week, we will have another very talented photographer. Sarah Berliner will be here to show her premiere film, the Golden Girls of Nassau Church. We hope you'll join us.
