Styles / Staged & conceptual
Staged tableau photography
- Key: the open sky, all around and above, soft.
- Lamp in the scene: a lamp, sign or screen, from behind, to the camera’s left, hard.
- Fill: a flash on the camera, from the camera, hard.
Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.
Schematic, not to scale: worked out from the style’s choices. No set-up of this style has been rendered yet.
The photographs that define it are still in copyright, so they are linked below rather than shown.
Pictures that look like a moment from a film: an ordinary room, street or suburb in which a figure is caught mid-action, glancing at something outside the frame, with a story implied but never told. Everything is arranged in advance: actors or the artist in role, chosen locations or built sets, cinema lighting at dusk, and later digital montage of many exposures. The results are single images, often large colour prints or lightboxes, sometimes small black-and-white 'stills'.
How the look is made
- Direct the scene: cast the figures, choose or build the set and rehearse the gesture before you expose.
- Show one ordinary moment that implies a before and an after; leave the story unresolved.
- Keep the figure within a setting that explains it, at a middle distance, rarely looking at the lens.
- Light it like a film: mix dusk daylight with lamps, windows and hidden strobes.
- Make each picture complete in itself, and print or light it at the size of a painting.
Shoot sheet for your kit
Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.
Light
Key: the open sky, all around and above, soft.
Lamp in the scene: a lamp, sign or screen, from behind, to the camera’s left, hard.
Fill: a flash on the camera, from the camera, hard.
- Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.
- Shadow edges
- Shadows that fade gradually from light to dark, cast by a large or diffused light: a window, a softbox, a cloudy sky.
- Shadow depth
- Shadows kept light and full of detail by a reflector, a fill light, bounce or bright surroundings (a low lighting ratio, up to about 3:1: the shadow side at most a stop and a half darker).
How the style is lit
- Film lighting rigs at dusk: daylight fading to blue, mixed with lamps in windows, headlights and street lights.
- Hidden or remote strobes that single out a figure in a street or car park at twilight.
- Overcast daylight over a whole scene, with figures placed and timed by direction.
This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.
Lens and settings
Start at
On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.
- The style’s f/19 on 8 × 10 in gives about the depth of field of f/2.5 on full frame.
- With flash, 1/125 s stays under every camera’s flash sync speed (1/160–1/250 s, by camera): set the exposure with the flash power and the f-number.
- Then
- 28–50 mm · f/8–f/45 · 1/125–8 s · ISO 100–400 on 8 × 10 in, inferred from the gear and the look. Stops, times and film speeds are inferred.
- White balance
- Daylight-balanced film or sensor at dusk; tungsten and fluorescent lamps in windows, cars and streets are left warm or green against the blue sky (inferred).
- Focal length
- Roughly the eye’s own perspective; no visible distortion.
- Focus
- Everything sharp from the nearest stone to the horizon.
- Angle
- The camera at the height of a standing person or of the subject.
- Distance
- Whole figures and their immediate surroundings.
- Crop & fill
- The subject shown small within its setting, which explains it.
- Depth
- Separate events in the foreground, middle ground and background.
- Instant
- Movement stopped dead by a fast shutter or flash.
- Duration
- An unmoving scene, exposed slowly and carefully.
Direct
Cast actors play a character caught between actions: absorbed in a task, reaching, walking or standing alone, eyes off the lens on something out of frame, face blank or quietly troubled; in group scenes each figure stays apart, not touching; hold the rehearsed gesture still, as if the film had been paused.
- Head & gaze
- Eyes off the frame, past the camera or into the distance, as if lost in thought. Attention on what the hands are doing or on a thing (working, reading, eating, playing), not on the camera.
- Expression
- Unsmiling, composed and blank: the face gives nothing away.
- The set-up
- A scene staged and directed like a film still or a painting. Sets, models and miniatures built to be photographed.
Style the set
Fully art-directed by a crew: actors in wardrobe chosen for the role, light make-up, a real house, street, yard or field picked as the location (or a built set), and props placed to hint at a story; nothing left as found.
- Clothes
- Period dress, fancy dress, stage costume or someone else’s clothes, worn to play a part rather than as one’s own.
- Set & props
- A real place picked for its look as the setting for a shoot, not the subjects’ own: a street, a field, a palace, a hotel room. Props chosen and placed for colour, texture and story: linen, ceramics, cutlery, flowers, scattered ingredients.
- How much is styled
- Clothes, hair, make-up, props and set all chosen and placed by a team to one idea.
Finish
- Monochrome
- Rich blacks, clean whites and every grey between.
- Colour
- Colour held back towards grey.
- Film
- A view camera on a tripod: great detail, slow and deliberate.
- Post-production
- Several photographs combined into one picture.
- Shown as
- Each picture stands on its own. Pictures made and shown as a set.
- Shown in
- Large prints on the wall, like paintings.
Stay away from candid & unobserved, unseen camera, snapshot, direct on-camera flash, document & record, photo gestures and unstyled, as found.
Before you shoot it
When you stage with people, cast consenting adults and credit them.
Where to see it
From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.
In copyright, so linked
- A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) , Jeff Wall, 1993. Tate.
- Untitled, from the series Twilight , Gregory Crewdson, 1998. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
- Untitled Film Still #13 , Cindy Sherman, 1978. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
- Andre Smith, 28 Years Old, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, $30 , Philip-Lorca diCorcia, 1991; printed 1993. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
With other styles
Pairs with Hollywood glamour portraiture. Borrow the studio still's lighting and costume for a single figure, then leave the scene unresolved instead of glamorous.
The opposite: New York street photography. Street photography finds the moment; tableau makes it: stage a street scene that keeps the casual look but has every figure placed.
The opposite: Diaristic snapshot photography. The diarist's flash records real friends unplanned; use the contrast to keep tableau pictures fully directed and lit from off camera.
Pairs with Düsseldorf School of Photography. Share the wall-sized colour print and sharp detail; place one directed incident inside a frontal, Düsseldorf-like view to make it uncanny.
Sources
- Pictures Generation, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictures_Generation (Pictures at Artists Space, 24 Sept–29 Oct 1977, curated by Douglas Crimp, five artists; Crimp's 'quotation, excerptation, framing, and staging'; Sherman added in 1979; Met exhibition 2009 curated by Douglas Eklund)
- Untitled Film Stills, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untitled_Film_Stills (1977–80, 70 black-and-white prints, Sherman casts herself, references to 1950s–60s Hollywood, noir, B movies and art cinema; MoMA acquisition 1995)
- Jeff Wall, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Wall (backlit Cibachrome transparencies from 1977, The Destroyed Room 1978, Picture for Women 1979, Mimic 1982, A Sudden Gust of Wind 1993 with actors and about 100 photographs; 'documentary' vs 'cinematographic'; digital montage since the early 1990s)
- Gregory Crewdson, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Crewdson (film-production crews and cinema lighting, Twilight 1998–2002, Beneath the Roses 2003–08, small towns of western Massachusetts, cited films and Hopper)
- Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip-Lorca_diCorcia (staged compositions, friends posed in fictional interiors from the late 1970s, hidden lights in streets, Hustlers with a 6 × 9 Linhof and Polaroid tests, titles with name, age, hometown and fee)
- Staged photography, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staged_photography (the photographer stages everything like a director; A. D. Coleman's 'directorial mode', Artforum 1976; 'staged photography' as a term from 1987; tableau photography as a related term)
- Tate collection record T06951, Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/wall-a-sudden-gust-of-wind-after-hokusai-t06951 (transparency on lightbox)
- SFMOMA collection records for Sherman, Untitled Film Still #13 (2003.207), Crewdson, Untitled from Twilight (99.601) and diCorcia, Andre Smith… (94.271): https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/99.601/ (dates, media, sizes)
- Gregory Crewdson – 25 years of Twilight, Avant Arte: https://avantarte.com/insights/articles/gregory-crewdson-25-years-of-twilight (all 40 Twilight images shot on a Sinar F1 8 × 10 camera with 300 mm and 210 mm lenses; tungsten, fluorescent and HMI lighting; each image merges several shots from one vantage point)
- An Interview with Gregory Crewdson, PetaPixel (18 May 2016): https://petapixel.com/2016/05/18/interview-gregory-crewdson/ (he shot 8 × 10 for many years before turning to digital)
- Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip-Lorca_diCorcia (for Hustlers he used a 6 × 9 Linhof view camera, positioned in advance with Polaroid tests)
- Cindy Sherman, The Complete Untitled Film Stills (Museum of Modern Art, 2003), artist's text, Monoskop: https://www.monoskop.org/images/b/b2/Sherman_Cindy_Complete_Untitled_Film_Stills.pdf (almost all interiors shot from a tripod, exteriors often handheld by friends; a flash held up while the camera was open for a few seconds (#48); a telephoto lens; rolls of film, at most six shots per character)