More than 30 works from the AMAM collection highlight art that merges the tradition of still-life painting with the much more recent phenomena of commercial and fine art photography, creating a third category that one could call object portraiture.

Some of these pictures look as if they have been plucked from mail-order catalogues or the pages of a food magazine, while others are more enigmatic, capturing an object’s reflection of light, for example, rather than its precise contours.

Unlike Renaissance still lifes, however, these works are not intended to convey symbolic meaning or a moralizing message, but instead celebrate the objects themselves, and the camera’s ability to transcribe them so intimately. They get at what the philosopher Martin Heidegger called the “thingness of things,” an essence that allows an object to stand on its own.

This exhibition was organized by Andrea Gyorody, Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.