‘Tech Vanitas’ confronts the anxiety surrounding technological obsolescence in photos

We live in an age filled with devices that make domestic life faster, smarter, easier, and more complicated. Consumers may choose from an astounding number of tech products. Items fill our shopping carts and our homes. The more we

The more we yearn to keep current—the newest phone, computer, camera, audio system, espresso maker—the more we produce, consume, and discard. Cutting-edge technology becomes outdated, embarrassing, quaint, collectible, and finally, antiquated or forgotten. Jeanette May‘s Tech Vanitas photographs confront the anxiety surrounding technological obsolescence.

Listen beautiful relax classics on our Youtube channel.

The original vanitas paintings celebrated the new wealth of The Netherlands in the 17th Century. Their still lifes recorded the affluence of finely crafted domestic merchandise: silk, porcelain, Venetian glass, silver goblets, and cultivated flowers. By including skulls and references to time, vanitas paintings also signified the inevitability of death.

Contemporary still lifes exist in the form of advertising imagery; the newest gadget is carefully styled and photographed to convince potential owners of technological ascension. Perhaps more than death, we fear becoming Luddites.

Just as the Dutch Golden Age still lifes portray the abundance afforded a prosperous culture, Tech Vanitas embraces luxury, honors design, and acknowledges the fleeting nature of earthly pleasures.

These contemporary vanitas still lifes utilize digital photography to capture precarious arrangements of domestic technological ephemera: a coffee percolator and film camera teeter atop a shiny boombox that spews magnetic tape across the keys of an Underwood typewriter.

May’s photographs utilize anachronistic technologies to confront still life’s traditional tension between temptation and rejection of worldly goods.


Source

Source: designfaves.com

Rating ‘Tech Vanitas’ confronts the anxiety surrounding technological obsolescence in photos is 5.0 / 5 Votes: 3
Please wait...
Loading...