Still life with an egg

I was browsing through a book of photographs by Paul Outerbridge, when I saw the “Semi-abstraction. 1923” (it is, apparently, part of the Met collection). I knew this is an image I want to try and re-create. They always tell you hard light is bad. Don’t photograph in the middle of the day. Do not take portraits in hard light. Use softbox, or diffuse or whatever. Somehow, Paul Outerbridge did not care for all those “don’ts”. He used hard light, and he used a lot of shadow-light contrast to turn everyday objects into geometrical shapes.

The task turned out to be far complex than I anticipated. A flashes. A box of cereal. A cardboard box cut into gobos. Until there was enough dark and white, and some intermediate gray for interest. Not as abstract as some of my images. One with the best use of light, though.

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