Still Life
Michelle Langstone talks with photographer Jane Ussher about her new book, Nature, Stilled
Jane Ussher’s new book Nature, Stilled is an object of quiet beauty. She traversed the depths of Te Papa’s collection, deep in “the bowels of the Earth” selecting objects to photograph for a shoot that became a highly technical process. Unable to personally touch any of the pieces she had chosen, she relied on a team of curators to assist her, moving the objects with gloved hands beneath the glow of a single lighting set-up. As she takes me through the book, running her fingertips over the photographs and describing their intrigues to me, it’s evident she is a very tactile person. Not being able to touch must have been a challenge — but not so much as deciding which objects to include in the book and how to troubleshoot the difficulties some of those marvellous and fragile items provided her.
Here she speaks about five of the book’s images, which she has chosen.
KIWI EGG, PLATE 001
“I was drawn to things that looked really fragile, that felt that they could be broken.
“There were a lot of kiwi eggs [in the collection] but the fact this one is cracked and discoloured ... it felt to me that it symbolised the threat that the kiwi is under. You sense that it must be very easy for predators to break the egg and eat the chicks.
“Then you had the original handwriting, and then the museum label. The tonal difference between this little cardboard box, and the soft padding, and then all the imperfections on the egg. The discolouration adds to it — it looks like something we should protect and it’s the perfect image to start the book.”
CHARLES KNIGHT LICHEN HERBARIUM, PLATE 023
“Charles Knight is a really highly respected collector. He made 300 albums. He made all these boxes, and just look at the way these have been sectioned off: each rock is within its own section. And the writing! This is very much the sort of thing that I started being obsessed about when I was down in the Antarctic [photographing Scott’s and Shackleton’s huts]: just the way that things are put together and the tapes and the pieces of card.
“So it wasn’t just the fact they were lichencovered rocks, it was the story that went behind; how they had been put into this box and been collected. The patina of the age of the box, the way it is discoloured. If these were being collected now they would be collected in a very different way.”
RED LIONFISH, PLATE 036
“This is definitely a departure from everything else. I hadn’t decided how I was going to photograph the fish. Fish are normally either in the jars in preserving liquid, or they’re in stainless steel tanks, which are as big as coffins, and they’ve got lids on them. You can’t see, because the liquid becomes a sort of tea colour, so you can sort of see shapes, but you can’t see individual fish.”
RAGGIANA BIRD-OFPARADISE, PLATE 092
“This is something that we did spend a lot of time with, in terms of composition. It was really important to me how this was balanced, with one [bird] back. We had to go through all the trays, because often when they’re laid down, their backs get very flat, so we had to find the best back.
“It really was a compositional decision to do it like this. Normally I use either threes or fives but, in a way, if there had been a fifth one, it wouldn’t have worked nearly as well. They’re beautiful; that gorgeous coppery colour, and they’re really different to any of the New Zealand species.
“Museums at the moment are far more interested in showing what’s in New Zealand as opposed to what’s offshore, but some of these just had to be included, because up until recently we did celebrate the Pacific Islands as well.”
SWALLOWTAIL BUTTERFLIES, PLATE 051
“Some of these, especially these blue ones, are so collectible that they’re bred for collectors, and not always ethically. Often these collections are in big trays where they are just a mass of one colour. This was quite unusual, and I loved the white one in the middle.
“You can’t move any of these things around, they’re all pinned down. So you can’t say to somebody, like in a chocolate shop, ‘Can I have the pink, blue and red one?’ What you see is what you get, so to find that range in the tray was exceptional. It’s almost like its own colour wheel.”
During a meeting with the curators, a suggestion was made that individual fish be placed on clear perspex and underlit in the same way the X-rays in the collection were photographed. It was a breakthrough for Ussher, who says the problem of how to shoot the fish was anxietyinducing.
“We’d be able to get the individual fish out and we’d be able to place them, and then we’d be able to put them back very quickly. No damage done! Amazing! I wanted it to feel very light, very transparent. When you see these normally they’re quite heavy, dark objects, but we were underlighting them, and using really long exposures so they weren’t silhouettes, so we were getting all the detail. You start seeing through their fins. It was just so exciting.”