Janina Green, From the Still Life series (Klytie Pate) 1988, hand coloured silver gelatin print, 47 x 60 cm
A beautiful hand-coloured photo by Janina Green featuring a vase by ceramicist Klytie Pate, an orange peel, a pearl necklace, and, of course, a bunch of wattle. This work is shown in an exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography called Dark Matters. Still life is a medium in which we at Garland take great interest: the Quarterly Essays are like still lives in words. This is what Janina Green says about her approach to still life in photography:
The best way to learn photography is to get an old analogue camera and take still life pictures. You can concentrate on aperture, speed and focus etc without having to worry about movement. The still life is a slow, reflective subject that can be a metaphor for the impermanence of life, Momento Mori and a metaphor for photography itself. Each photograph is a moment in time—frozen forever. This still life is dominated by a lamp base designed by the Australian potter Klytie Pate. It has a decorative art deco style relying on flower motifs. It was tricky colouring the ceramic in this image, as I tried to match the glaze, which Klytie was famous for, often called “Klytie Blue”. The colour looks like what we might call Turquoise. Klytie died in 2010 at 97 years of age. Her uncle was Napier Waller.
Janina Green is represented by M.33 Melbourne.
