Vanitas Still Life with Cigarette
A symbolic still life photograph about the futility of smoking as a means of pursuing happiness, created in the style of 17th-century Dutch painting. The dice, hourglass and skull borrow from the visual language of vanitas paintings, where ordinary objects become reminders of chance, time and mortality.
I wanted the photograph to work entirely in camera. The bubble took an insane number of attempts to catch at exactly the right moment and position above the cigarette. The hourglass had to be reset every time the sand ran out. I knew I could simply composite it afterwards, but that would have defeated part of the challenge.
If I knew the image was physically possible to make in real life, I wanted to make it.
The Pursuit of Happiness
Some of the other details were constructed specifically for the photograph. I sculpted the dice by hand from clay because the ones I could find looked too clean and regular. I went out in the middle of the night to find a stone tile that would work as the base for the composition.
To imitate the window reflections often seen in old paintings, I taped a cross over the rectangular softbox on my main light, creating the reflected window shape visible in the hourglass and bubble.
I spray-varnished the skull with a matte finish to make the plastic surface more convincing. And as much as I would like to appear deep and mysterious, no, it is not a real human skull.
Several of my early photographs featured skulls. You could say they were my first models: patient subjects for learning how light and facial anatomy work before I moved on to real people.
Influence
Although my photograph was inspired by the symbolism and visual language of 17th-century Dutch vanitas painting, there is a much later work with a strikingly similar composition: Vincent van Gogh’s Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette.
A close visual parallel to my composition.
I wasn’t consciously trying to reproduce it – although that too would have been a cool experiment – but certain images have a way of staying with you. I often find that something I’ve seen years earlier resurfaces in my own work without me deliberately thinking about it. Never exactly the same, but somehow ingrained in visual memory.
