Art of Arrangement: Photography and the Still Life Tradition

Art of Arrangement: Photography and the Still Life Tradition is a visually arresting exhibition at Bath’s Holburne Museum. Organised in partnership with the National Media Museum, it surveys the many ways in which photographers have explored still life. 

Still life has captured the imagination of photographers from the early 19th century to the present day. When early photographers adopted the still life genre, they inherited a rich visual tradition, found in centuries of painting. It is a tradition full of lavish, exotic and sometimes dark arrangements, full of symbolic depth and meaning.

Historically, painters used the rich decorative possibilities of still life to demonstrate their technical skill and to create a feast for the senses. Photographers, throughout the history of the medium, have extended the possibilities of the still life genre and tradition. They have not only used the subject as a vehicle for creative expression, but for documentary and scientific enquiry, and for the development of inventories and catalogues.

This exhibition builds on the rich tradition, symbolic nature and history of still life. It considers the formal and aesthetic conventions photographers have used, and how they have been adapted and subverted to invest new meaning in the photograph.

Drawn exclusively from the National Media Museum Photography Collection, Art of Arrangement: Photography and the Still Life Tradition includes photographs by Ansel Adams, Harold Edgerton, Roger Fenton, Edward Steichen, William Henry Fox Talbot and Madame Yevonde, as well as contemporary photographers such as Chris Killip and Don McCullin.