Untitled

In the late 1970s Jan Groover began an intense engagement with the still-life genre. Here she took the domestic space of the kitchen sink as the setting for an arrangement of pastry tins, peppers, and utensils—unlike the canonical still-life photographs of Edward Weston, which picture vegetables as erotic objects. Although Groover depicted humble, everyday objects, the scene is anything but casual. Showing pristine surfaces and deliberately composed, the photograph seems nearly abstract, as if it were mainly about the interaction of light, shape, and surface. Groover carefully staged her arrangement, using artificial light and a pane of glass to produce strange reflections, and she employed the artisanal practice of platinum-palladium printing, which allows for an extended range of gray tones.