Over the course of her decades-long career, US-born photographer Sharon Core has mastered the art of recreating iconic still life paintings on camera.
Sharon Core
Born in 1965 in New Orleans, Louisiana, Sharon Core has dedicated her life to the arts. A profile of Core written by the Guggenheim, one of New York City’s most prestigious modern art museums, shows that her career began at the University of Georgia, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in painting in 1987.
Core went on to receive a Masters of Fine Art in photography from Yale University School of Fine Arts, one of the world’s most renowned educational institutions, in 1998. She showed a talent for photography early; during her time at Yale Core was awarded the George Sakier Memorial Prize for Excellence in Photography, after which she went on to establish a career as a celebrated fine art photographer.
Artistic influences
The Louisiana-native’s primary influences include Raphaelle Peale and Wayne Theibaud. Raphaelle Peale was a 19th Century American still life painter. He was considered the first really distinguished still-life specialist to emerge in the US and his work typically depicted a few objects (often foodstuffs), arranged on a table top before a darkened background.
Meanwhile, Wayne Theibaud is an American painter who was born in 1920. Theibaud is widely known for his paintings of ‘production line objects’ such as pastries and pies and is heavily associated with the pop art movement. He typically used heavy pigment and exaggerated colours to depict his subjects, often combining them with the well-defined shadows characteristic of advertisements to create paintings which burst with vibrant colour.
Masterful reproduction
Sharon Core specialises in taking the works of celebrated painters such as Peale and Thiebaud and re-creating them on camera. She’s known for painstakingly producing still lifes of items such as food and flowers, meticulously recreating the light and even the texture of the originals to craft stunning photographs which masquerade as paintings.
Core first received major attention for her Theibaud series, which she shot between 2003 and 2004. Here she created photographic simulations of some of Theibaud’s most iconic works, using her experience as both a painter and a pastry chef to produce compelling snaps of items such as cakes, hotdogs, and sandwiches.
She built on this with the Early American series, shot between 2007 and 2008. With this project, Core recreated a number of Peale’s still life subjects including flowers, fish, watermelons and even genuine antique crockery and glassware. Core’s work has since been exhibited in a number of the world’s most illustrious museums including the Guggenheim and Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York, as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai.
Deceptive beauty
No fine art photographer is more skilled at recreating classic still life paintings on camera than Sharon Core. She takes the source material and experiments with its core elements to unearth the complexities of her subject, producing photographs that are known around the world for their deceptively simple beauty.
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