Anatomy of an Image

Still Life with Rat and Currency

Happy new year, my dear vultures! With 2020 (finally) behind us, I thought it would make sense to take a break from promoting Strange Flowers and instead discuss some newer work. So, for a change of pace, this week, I thought it’d be fun to take a very deep dive into one single image, talking in depth about the creative process, symbolism, composition / lighting techniques, post-processing, etc.

Connection to Dutch Still Life

Vanitas by Pieter Claesz

Like all my work, this composition draws considerably from the iconography and philosophy of the works of the 17th-century Dutch masters. This particular image borrows from classical vanitas paintings which often placed markers of material wealth (money and/or precious goods) alongside reminders of mortality (dead animals, skulls, clocks, extinguished candles, etc). By placing these items in contrast, painters like Pieter Claesz made a moralistic statement about the transience of earthy pleasures and the triviality of material wealth in the face of certain extinction.

My intentions with this image are very much along those lines, although I tend to broach these subjects from a secular perspective, whereas those old paintings were usually explicitly Christian in their ideology. I also borrowed some common visual motifs from those old paintings. The tipped cup in the upper right quadrant of this image, for example, is usually understood as a reminder of the fragility of life. Notice also that the plate with the rat and money dangles precariously over the edge of the table, threatening to tumble into the darkness beyond. This, too, is meant as a reminder of instability, uncertainty, and transience.

The Great Polish Poet

Although this image owes a great debt to the history of still life painting, I actually had a somewhat more specific inspiration in mind when I made this arrangement: the piece is very much centred around a single quotation – “a rat became the unit of currency“ – from one of my favourite poems.

Ever since the early days of the COVID lockdown, I’ve found my mind returning time and time again to the poem Report from a Besieged City, by the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. The poem is narrated by an elderly man who chronicles day-to-day life in a city under siege by some unnamed invaders. (The piece was almost certainly inspired by Herbert’s own experiences working with the resistance in Nazi-occupied Poland.)

Early in the poem our narrator is describing the monotony of existence in those strange and uncertain times, the empty shelves at the grocery store, the constant flood of bad news. It is in this context, that the line “a rat became the unit of currency“ arises.

As I read the poem, Herbert seems to be expressing an idea very similar to those old vanitas paintings. He seems to be trying to shine a light on how arbitrary our notions of the value of currency are and, at the same time, showing the worthlessness of material wealth in the face of certain death. (This quotation appears at the beginning of Don DeLillo’s novel, Cosmopolis, which is very much a critique of unfettered capitalism, so I believe it’s fair to say that I’m not the only person who reads this poem in this way.)

To me, this quotation seems to allude to the idea that the cruelty our economic systems becomes exacerbated and intensified when we are living through periods of crisis and upheaval. It is hard for me to think of themes more relevant to the world at this moment in history. And so, here, at last, is the still life composition I have been wanting to shoot ever since the early days of the pandemic.

Composition and Lighting

When contemporary photographers talk about “composition” they usually mean a handful of guidlines: rule of thirds, leading lines, pattern interruptions, etc. More generally, though, a compositional “rule” is just any guiding principle for how items are placed in the viewfinder. Here, with this image, my “rule“ was to have the items arranged in a triangular geometry.

Illustrating the triangular arrangement

I love composing my arrangement in this kind of geometrical way. I learned this technique from studying the Dutch masters, and I feel that it lends something elegant and timeless to an image. At the same time, triangular road signage is usually meant as a warning of some hazard coming down the road; an implicit idea that seems very much relevant to the themes of this image. (At least that’s what triangular roads signs meant in Canada and the US; I’m sure that’s not universal.)

My studio set-up and lighting rig for this arrangement were very simple. I use a single key light, usually a continuous light with a soft-box as the modifier. I’m sure there are many set-ups that would work for this style of photography, but this is the one that seems to work the best for me at reproducing the dramatic Caravaggio style lighting that I love so much.

An example of my lighting and shooting set-up

Post-Processing

I get a lot of questions about my post-processing workflow. Often these come from people who want me to share what they imagine is some super-duper-top-secret trick in photoshop for making a snapshot look like an old fashioned still life painting. Sadly, there is no secret to share, and I often find myself at a loss about how to answer questions like this. The truth is that my post processing workflow is pretty simple and you can learn every technique I’m using in pretty much any “lightroom editing tips“ video on YouTube. The only “trick“ I use is that there are LOTS of microscopic exposure adjustments going on for every image. Typically I dodge and burn for hours, using dozens and dozens of radial filters and brush strokes. That’s basically it. I’m sorry to say that I have no super special secret technique. Maybe someday I’ll do a real-time editing video and prove this explicitly.

Post processing workflow in Lightroom

Having done the majority of my editing in Lightroom, I usually move the image over the Photoshop for a few finishing touches. Again, these are pretty simple adjustments, mostly just using the clone-stamp and spot-removal tools to erase any unwanted dirt on the tablecloth or ugly wrinkles or – as in the image above – traces of my studio’s floor and baseboards in the background.

That’s really all there is to my workflow. In my experience, when an image looks beautiful it’s not because of one Lightroom slider or Photoshop filter or whatever. Usually, an image works because a lot of small things are working together, in concert with one another.

Wrapping Up

So that’s that, the end of my deep dive into this one still life arrangement. In my next dispatch I’ll get back to talking about Strange Flowers.

I hope that you’re all keeping safe through these strange and uncertain times. Keep well, my dear vultures. Here’s to hoping that 2021 is better than 2020…