Paulette Tavormina (born 1949 in Rockville Centre, New York) is an American fine-art photographer who lives and works in Connecticut and New York City. Tavormina is best known for her series, Natura Morta , which features photographic imagery inspired by 17th century Dutch, Spanish and Italian Old Master still life painters. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Tavormina's interest in photography grew out of a 1980's request by a New York public relations firm to photograph a visiting celebrity. [5] She then took an introductory class at the International Center of Photography in New York. After moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, Tavormina took a class in black and white photography and darkroom technique, and became a commercial photographer, specializing in historical Indian pottery and Navajo jewelry. She also worked as a food stylist, collaborating on six cookbooks, including The Coyote Café Cookbook and The Red Sage Cookbook. She adapted her food styling experience to become a prop and food specialist for Hollywood films including The Astronaut's Wife , [6] where part of her work involved creating elaborate food scenes. [5] While in Santa Fe, Tavormina became fascinated by the work of Sarah McCarty, [7] a Santa Fe-based still life painter and was introduced to the works of 17th century Old Master still-life painters Giovanna Garzoni and Maria Sibylla Merian.
Early in her career, Tavormina spent six years working at Sotheby's auction house in New York, surrounded by fine art. Returning to New York in the mid-2000s, after a period learning Italian and finding her ancestral roots in Sicily, Tavormina joined Sotheby's again, photographing works of art for their auction catalogues. Tavormina began experimenting and creating photographic images reminiscent of the still life art of Dutch, Italian and Spanish painters of the 17th century, including Francesco de Zurbarán, Giovanna Garzoni, Maria Sibylla Merian, and Willem Claesz Heda. By 2009, Tavormina had developed the lighting and composition style that forms the backbone of her Natura Morta series, and the work was shown publicly for the first time in 2009 at Sotheby's. Her first gallery show was the Still Seen group exhibition [8] at Robert Klein Gallery in Boston in the fall of 2009. Tavormina's work has since been part of many solo and group exhibitions.
In addition to her fine-art photography, Tavormina has a successful career as a commercial photographer, including the "Alchemist's Garden" fragrance campaign for Gucci, and Goop's "edition 01" perfume. She has photographed recipes for the Del Posto Cookbook, The 1802 Beekman Heirloom Cookbook [9] and The 1802 Beekman Heirloom Dessert Cookbook and other commercial publications such as Sotheby's at Auction, [10] Martha Stewart Weddings, [11] The New York Times, [12] and National Geographic magazine. [13]
A monograph entitled Paulette Tavormina: Seizing Beauty was published in 2016 by The Monacelli Press. [14] This 160-page volume incorporates plates of Tavormina's major works from the period 2008 to 2015 as well as essays by the art and photography scholars Silvia Malaguzzi, Mark Alice Durant and Anke Van Wagenberg-Ter Hoeven. [15] [16]
In August 2016, Tavormina was selected by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation as a 2016 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner grant.
In November 2010, Tavormina was awarded [17] [18] the Grand Prix of the Festival International de la Photographie Culinaire, a juried photography competition held annually in Paris, France.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the fourth-largest museum in the world and the largest art museum in the Americas. With 5.36 million visitors in 2023, it is the most-visited museum in the United States and the fourth-most visited art museum in the world.
Wolfgang Tillmans is a German photographer. His diverse body of work is distinguished by observation of his surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium’s foundations.
Nancy Goldin is an American photographer and activist. Her work often explores LGBT subcultures, moments of intimacy, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the opioid epidemic. Her most notable work is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). The monograph documents the post-Stonewall, gay subculture and includes Goldin's family and friends. She is a founding member of the advocacy group P.A.I.N.. She lives and works in New York City.
Sally Mann is an American photographer known for making large format black and white photographs of people and places in her immediate surroundings: her children, husband, and rural landscapes, as well as self-portraits.
George Platt Lynes was an American fashion and commercial photographer who worked in the 1930s and 1940s. He produced photographs featuring many gay artists and writers from the 1940s that were acquired by the Kinsey Institute.
Aaron Siskind was an American photographer whose work focuses on the details of things, presented as flat surfaces to create a new image independent of the original subject. He was closely involved with, if not a part of, the abstract expressionist movement, and was close friends with painters Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning.
Vince Aletti is a curator, writer, and photography critic.
Matthew Russell Rolston is an American artist, photographer, director and creative director, known for his lighting techniques and detailed approach to art direction and design. Rolston has been identified throughout his career with the revival and modern expression of Hollywood glamour.
Audrey Lenora Flack was an American visual artist. Her work pioneered the art genre of photorealism and encompasses painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography.
Giovanna Garzoni (1600–1670) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period. She began her career painting religious, mythological, and allegorical subjects but gained fame for her botanical subjects painted in tempera and watercolour. Her works were praised for their precision and balance and for the exactitude of the objects depicted. More recently, her paintings have been seen to have female bodily associations and proto-feminist sentiments. She combined objects very inventively, including Asian porcelain, exotic seashells, and botanical specimens. She was often called the Chaste Giovanna due to her vow to remain a virgin. Scholars have speculated Garzoni may have been influenced by fellow botanical painter Jacopo Ligozzi although details about Garzoni's training are unknown.
Robert Polidori is a Canadian-American photographer known for his large-scale color images of architecture, urban environments and interiors. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Martin-Gropius-Bau museum (Berlin), and Instituto Moreira Salles. His photographs are also included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Château de Versailles, Centre Pompidou (Paris), and Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), as well as many private collections.
Janette Beckman is a British documentary photographer who has worked in London, New York and Los Angeles. Beckman describes herself as a documentary photographer. While she produces a lot of work on location, she is also a studio portrait photographer. Her work has appeared on records for the major labels, and in magazines including Esquire,Rolling Stone,Glamour,Italian Vogue,The Times,Newsweek,Jalouse,Mojo and others.
Nick Brandt is an English photographer. Nick Brandt's photographs focus on the impact of environmental destruction and climate breakdown, for both some of the most vulnerable people across the planet and for the animal and natural world.
Zanele Muholi is a South African artist and visual activist working in photography, video, and installation. Muholi's work focuses on race, gender and sexuality with a body of work that dates back to the early 2000s, documenting and celebrating the lives of South Africa's Black lesbian, gay, transgender, and intersex communities. Muholi is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, explaining that "I'm just human".
Oliver Mark is a German photographer and artist known primarily for his portraits of international celebrities.
Margaret Watkins (1884–1969) was a Canadian photographer who is remembered for her innovative contributions to advertising photography. She was also a pioneering modernist photographer; her still-life images of household objects arranged in compositions influenced by abstract art were highly innovative and influential.
Melissa Zexter is a Brooklyn-based artist who creates embroidered photography.
Gauri Gill is an Indian contemporary photographer who lives in New Delhi. She has been called "one of India's most respected photographers" by the New York Times and one of "the most thoughtful photographers active in India today" in The Wire. In 2011 Gill was awarded the Grange Prize, Canada's most prestigious contemporary photography award. The jury said her works "often address ordinary heroism within challenging environments depicting the artist's often-intimate relationships with her subjects with a documentary spirit and a human concern over issues of survival."
Tessa Traeger is a British photographer. She is known for her still life and food photography, and has worked as an advertising photographer. Her work has been published in two books of her own; included in a number of books with others on gardening and food; exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions; and is held in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Cig Harvey is a British fine art photographer known for her surreal images of nature and family. Her work has been compared to René Magritte and has been described as revealing "the mysticism in the mundane." Harvey's work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Farnsworth Art Museum.
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