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The Push-me Pull-you school of seduction in Yvonne Todd’s works is like a hangover from a seventeenth century still-life vanitas painting. Todd’s images are at once alluring, even glamorous and at the same time they document a perpetual, uneasy state of malaise.1 Her photographs recall the methods and iconography of Northern European artists who, fascinated by optical realism, created lush detailed images of elements from everyday life, but who off-set this sumptuous show of material wealth with symbolic reminders of mortality and the impermanence of material things: skulls, dying flowers, rotting fruit. Todd’s images are on the one hand deeply enticing, richly observed and on the other, slightly repellent, feeding off ‘a morbid fascination for the unhealthy, the sentimental and the tragic’.2
The seventeenth century still life tradition is an ancestor of contemporary product photography: both worship worldly, secular charms. The creation of a culture of desire around the photographic image is rampant. Contemporary consumer culture is saddled with an over-investment in image, replete with seductive images of everything from designer furniture, hi-fi equipment, cell phones, to food and cosmetics. Today’s product photography is however, without the moralising tones of those realist oil paintings of lavish scenes from life, which acknowledged material relics as memento mori, symbolic reminders of life’s impermanence. One of Todd’s newest works, Clammy Pipes, 2006 however, comes close. A medley of plumbing pipes, observed with finesse, which are loaded with an unhealthy beading of condensation. The image plays host to a range of unpleasant associations from there, of rising damp, of problems with your waterworks, of night sweats; presumably not the connotations the pipe manufacturer would wish to project.
Todd’s adoption of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline