When we are in chaos and anxiety, the urge to do something becomes stronger. So to speak, the boredom of being locked inside early this year prompted this new photo book project, Still Life. In 2020, no matter where we are, we all experienced a similar but not the same predicament. When photographers are constrained by reality, or caught in a battle with boredom and anxiety, we couldn’t help it wonder, without the trigger points of taking photographs, where would their lens go? Will ‘photography’ still happen?

We invited photographers we’ve been closely watching. In this project, an intervention has been imposed onto their freely selected topics, each photographer needs to create their stories indoors using limited equipment. As a result, the photographic collective Still Life includes 13 works from different photographers around the world.

The title Still Life comes from the principal genre of Western art, which was endowed with a beautiful meaning — life is still. Here in this book, ‘Still Life’ is considered as a metaphor for the state of continuing living in this predicament — in the context of the pandemic, a relatively still state we are all in.

Photographers: Antje Peters, Bobby Doherty, Caroline Tompkins, Charles Negre, David Brandon Geeting, Geray Mena, Harley Weir, Makoto Oono, Peng Ke, Sergiy Barchuk, Sophie Tianxin Chen, Thomas Albdorf, Xiaopeng Yuan.