“Take a picture, it will last longer.” It’s an ironic phrase that belongs to the playgrounds of the mid-1990s and early 2000s—a taunt thrown out to those who dared to stare too long. Yet underneath the sarcasm is a sentiment that goes back hundreds of years. Vanitas still life painting emerged as a genre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was popular amongst Dutch Baroque painters and Spanish artists of the Golden Age. It was a reminder of mortality—capturing flowers on the edge of rot and candles just snuffed out. When photography arrived in the mid-1800s, the camera was employed in much the same way. The message: all things come to end, so we’d better capture it while it’s still here.

Text by Eleanor Sutherland, Aesthetica Magazine