In 2007 Sharon Core encountered the still lifes of Raphaelle Peale, the early nineteenth-century American painter whose fruit, cakes, and vegetables carry an uncanny lifelikeness. The encounter led Core toward the series gathered here, though affinity with Peale was only part of the impetus; she was equally drawn to questions of illusionism and trompe l’oeil and to how photography stands in relation to them. Working from reproductions, she studied Peale’s paintings intensively and replicated his subject matter, lighting, and compositional tendencies as closely as she could. She acquired period porcelain and glass and grew, from heirloom seeds, varieties of fruits and vegetables that existed in the early nineteenth century. “Through these efforts,” she writes, “I hoped to achieve a mirroring of Peale’s painstaking painting process, and the themes that lie under their surfaces.”
What distinguishes the project is a multi-level reversal. Peale’s paintings aspire to lifelikeness; Core’s photographs turn that aspiration back toward painting. Photographing perishable arrangements that must be assembled, lit, and fixed before they spoil, she submits the camera to a painter’s discipline of composition and light, and much of the meaning of the work sits in the gaps between original and copy. Differences of time, place, and technology separate the two bodies of work, and those distances open onto cultural memory, nostalgia, and loss, and onto how the American past is perceived.
The photographs deliver on that preparation. Fruit, cake, and tableware arrive with the strange animation of natures mortes, an American austerity, and a deliberate withholding of the artist’s signature hand in favor of minute replication. The book, published by Radius Books with text by Brian Sholis, presents the project in eighty-two pages and in a hardback with jacket.
For collectors, the claims are twofold. Early American documents a sustained, closely argued body of work by a photographer known for reimagining the images of others, and it presents that work in a considered, generously scaled object from a publisher attentive to the book as a form. The project’s force depends on exactness rather than breadth, and the volume holds to that register.
