Sentimental Still-Lifes
Paul Quitoriano takes a walk down memory lane with his Tamron SP 35mm F/1.4 prime lens.
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By Jenn Gidman
Images by Paul Quitoriano
When Paul Quitoriano first started college, his plan was to become a fireman and paramedic. “I was just out of high school and wasn’t sure yet what I wanted to do,” he says. “When I found out what the job actually entailed, I realized it wasn’t for me and started exploring other avenues.”
Paul transferred to San Francisco State University and studied journalism and photography, and a new path emerged. “After I graduated, I moved east to New York, where I started out doing random photojournalism assignments for the Village Voice, which led to other opportunities, such as a stint for several years at the archive for Vogue, followed by work for the Wall Street Journal and Gothamist, where I dove into food photography.”
Today Paul’s focus lies in portraiture and still lifes, and he wanted to come up with a creative concept for the latter while test-driving the Tamron SP 35mm F/1.4 prime lens. “I wanted to give myself the challenge of doing something different from how I usually shoot beauty products or a meal at a restaurant,” he says. “And so I came up with the idea to document sentimental artifacts—those things we all keep to varying degrees to remind us of past relationships or important times in our lives. Think old love letters, an ex’s toothbrush, an old bank card, jewelry that someone left at your place and never came back for.”
35mm, F/5, 160 sec., ISO 100
Click image to view larger
Paul says he was somewhat nervous using a 35mm prime for the extreme closeups he wanted to create, figuring it might result in too much distortion, but he was pleasantly surprised at how his images turned out. “I was right up on these items, and I barely needed to make any corrections in post,” he says. “The sharpness of the 35mm was out of this world, especially on some of the items with faded print. The bokeh I was able to achieve with this lens, when I wanted to occasionally isolate one or two of the items and blur the rest out, was also amazing.”
35mm, F/5, 160 sec., ISO 100
Click image to view larger
When Paul is photographing still lifes, he appreciates that it takes him out of his photojournalism background and forces him to pay more attention to shapes and colors. “When I photograph liquor or beauty brands, for example, I stop seeing the brand itself—instead, I find myself focusing on how light and shadow interacts with the objects in front of my camera, or colors that pop,” he says. “That was my goal with this project, where I wanted to draw attention to the items, but also figure out a way to style them so they could play off each other in the larger image.”
The first time Paul photographed the items for this session, he used a wooden table he had in his apartment to give the photos a more homey vibe, but he wasn’t thrilled with how busy those images looked. “The background was distracting me from my subjects,” he says. “So I switched to a plain white seamless to make the objects pop a little more.”
It was a gloomy day when Paul worked on these photos, so he needed to get his lighting right. “I shot this on a rainy day, which in a way was perfect for the cinematic mood of going through these sentimental items,” he says. “I set up a couple of Profoto lights and tried to achieve as sunny a vibe as possible, with bright light and hard shadows, using fill cards to help me achieve my task.”
Figuring out how to style and position the items before him became Paul’s main challenge. “I didn’t want the images to be too busy, so I narrowed the number of items down to about 20, of various-sized items,” he says. “The biggest item is the shirt, while the smallest item is that set of earrings you see. I used the shirt as an anchor of sort, then tried to think of appropriate groupings I could put together. For instance, I tried to place the correspondence, like the postcard and valentine, close together, and did the same for much of the jewelry. That drove my composition.”
35mm, F/5, 160 sec., ISO 100
Click image to view larger
Paul also tried to think of different ways to approach photographing his subjects. “For some of the shots, I was shooting straight down from above, but I didn’t want to make them all like that,” he says. “Doing it completely grid-style like that felt very e-commerce, like I was trying to sell these things on Instagram. So I alternated those images with ones where I occasionally tried to stand items up or stack them, like the watch draped over the camera. It lent a more architectural look, which was less about simply viewing these disparate items and more about how they interacted with each other.”
35mm, F/5, 160 sec., ISO 100
Click image to view larger
35mm, F/5, 160 sec., ISO 100
Click image to view larger
35mm, F/5, 160 sec., ISO 100
Click image to view larger
One key way that this still-life project differed from similar shoots he’s done in this vein: he didn’t have someone to bounce ideas off of. “Usually when I’m working, there’s a food or prop stylist I can collaborate with, say, ‘Hey, do you think this works like this?’ And I actually did originally have someone lined up to assist me with this, but once the project became so personal, incorporating so many nostalgic things from my past, I felt I wanted to do it alone. I enjoyed the challenge of telling a story using these blasts from the past, and of taking that walk down memory lane.”
35mm, F/5, 160 sec., ISO 100
Click image to view larger
To see more of Paul Quitoriano’s work, check out his website and Instagram.
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