Family Still Life

Anna Labbe

The Labbes

MARCH 24, 2019

For this project, I had to get some inspiration online for what I wanted to do. I was inspired by Camilla Catrambone's still lives of her family, and decided to incorporate some of her style into my image. I knew that I had to create one final image that reflected my family in still life form, but I also wanted to celebrate my family's individuality and what makes us us. So, I decided to take separate images of each of my "family members", and combine them into one full image, creating my family through objects. I went around the house and collected objects that reminded me of each of my family members, and framed them around one defining shirt / clothing piece of theirs. For example, I chose my favorite green striped sweater for my center clothing piece, and my mom's red Pooh bear sweatshirt that she always wears for hers.

The image goes like this: top left is me, top right is Claudia, bottom left is my mom, and bottom right is my dad. Some of the choices for each person were very obvious, and I think that's what makes this image so fun. I wanted to collect the inanimate objects that really formed / represented each of my family members in my mind. For me, it was my sock monkey and Harry Potter. For Claudia, it was the Walking Dead and her Playstation remote. For my mom, it was M&Ms and a wooden spoon. For my dad, it was batteries and popcorn. I also got input from my family on what should be in their images, like how my mom said that there should be peanuts in my dad's image, and how Claudia said that there had to be Spiderman in mine. I really had a lot of fun creating this final image.

There were a few technical difficulties that I struggled with in taking this picture, however. For example, the lighting kind of looks weird with the stitching together of the images because the only window was on the right of my table, and therefore left a shadow from the objects. I couldn't find a way to fix this without getting the shadow of myself in the image, or changing the background, because I really wanted all of the objects to have a unifying background, and the dining room table was the only surface big enough. I also had a hard time getting all of the objects into frame even when I was standing on a chair above the table, but overall I think it turned out okay!