“It’s been said many times that still-life photographers don’t take pictures, they make them – an obvious and striking fact when you look at these works.
Each is carefully constructed to maximize the possibilities of color, texture, light, and space in order to counteract, however briefly, the hurried and distracted age in which we live – to make us pause and look.
They do so not by turning the familiar alien and strange in that process known as defamiliarization, but by treating every object with an intense, fresh focus – a careful and extreme lucidity – that seems to remove a patina of dust that we never registered until this moment, when it’s cleared away, and simple things – a flower on a windowsill; the dusky, purple skin of a fig; or the folds of a silk cloth – appear before us as they’ve never done before.
At times these objects and their careful arrangement before the lens evoke dramatic life events and hint at complex narratives; at others, they immerse the viewer in a simpler contemplation of the here-and-now.”
— Graham Hettlinger
