David Bate: Still Life as Critical Aesthetics

Teacher: David Bate

This practical workshop will explore the visual language of still life as a form for critical aesthetics. Still life is more than just nature morte, it is like a miniature landscape. Taking this idea, the workshop will introduce a range of ideas and issues and related strategies of critical use and encourage participants to explore these in their own way.

Still life is one of the great art forms used across many fields of art, including the key early photographers Niépsce and Fox Talbot among others, and is continued right through to contemporary art photographers, like Jeff Wall or Wolfgang Tilmans. The workshop will look at the work of different photographers and artists, and develop ideas of critical aesthetics alongside practical photographic work where participants can develop individual projects. Ranging from realism to allegory, impressionism to surrealism, still life can link common objects to uncommon meanings, in relation to the habits of a particular culture.

© David Bate, A Political Error from the series Bungled Memories, 2008