Vince Aletti is not only the eminent authority on disco, he’s one of the most renowned photography critics around, and he received notoriety for curating a show centered around the male body, called Male at Wessel + O’Connor Gallery in 1998. He is curating a show that “opens” on July 27th, 2011 on Paddle8.com, a new website that launched recently with The Art of Wit, a show curated by Glenn O’Brien. It’s a novel idea, a website that approaches displaying art as if it were a gallery show. Aletti’s show, Stuff, features still life photography, a very curious topic indeed for the video-obsessed internet audience. Aletti took some time out to explain himself:

    “I worked with the New York Photo Festival last spring in Brooklyn. They bring in curators to put on a show for a weekend in DUMBO. I wanted to challenge myself on some level, but I also wanted to overturn some expectations. And partly, for me, at that point, it was also because it was very shortly after Irving Penn had died. Penn is one of my heroes, and his still lifes are some of what I think were the most beautiful photographic still lifes ever made. So, I was thinking about him, I was thinking about losing him, losing that vision, and also thinking about who else was working in still life—whose work I valued.
   [The Paddle8 show] is very inspired by [Penn]. One of the things I like is a contradiction in his work between extreme elegance and a kind of mess. He appreciates both in a picture. He is sort of famous for putting an ant in a still life, or putting an insect into a place that normally you wouldn’t want to see it, but also appreciating the dying flower, the cigarette butts on the street, the mess in the gutter, things that he pulls out off the street and then isolates in the studio. The combination of materials that are so carefully chosen, and we know from hearing about it that he is someone who would go through 80 pairs before finding the exact right one. At the same time he would put it next to a pile of sand, or some ashes from a cigarette so that there would be this combination of beauty and grunge. I love that dichotomy in a way, his ability to see the beautiful things, or the sort of established beautiful things, and then appreciate the rot, or the dying leaf, or the really ugly thing, or the thing we don’t look at and don’t really want to look at.
    [The Paddle8 show] turned out to be quite a number of people. I started thinking about who else was out there making work that interested me from the point of view of still life. I think I only used about ten or twelve photographers [in the New York Photo Festival show]. I didn’t want to think strictly in terms of the arranged tabletop still life, while there are definitely some things in the show that include that. I wanted to open it up to more quirky work, more work that was probably not made with the intention of a still life, work that had incorporated landscapes, interior views.
    I think still life has a kind of classic connotation for a lot of people and I wanted to pull away from that. One of the photographers who I am using, Ray Mortenson, his last show was of trash heaps that he found in the Jersey Meadowlands. It contained these close ups of tires, and things that had almost been incorporated into the landscape, with the tree trunks and weeds and all kinds of natural material. Ropes, sinks, pieces of stone, and pieces of metal all mashed together and really thrown at you, so you’re really close up to this material. He titled the show “Still Life,” which I thought was really interesting, because it was exactly the way I was thinking about it. I don’t think that most people would see these fragmented landscapes as still life studies, but they are. They’re gorgeous because all of this trash ends up being transformed into something much more exciting in the frame.
    The Peter Hujar work that I am using, it’s work that had never been printed in his lifetime, of [his longtime partner] Paul Thek working in his studio, and mainly a whole range of images, of texts, of studio, of materials, and art work in progress. So, the work was made essentially as kind of documentation of Thek’s process, of Thek at work. There was a sensibility there, seeing the studio as an arrangement of objects, a very elaborate, scattered piece of art. A lot of the images that came out of that are really pretty beautiful. They’re very revealing of Thek’s process, but also Hujar’s eye. I saw them as a collaboration between two artists who have a real history together.
    [For] Shen Wei, the work I am using is almost classic still lifes. They are not like anything I have ever seen of his work before—the first works I had seen of his were mostly self-portraits in the nude, which I thought were pretty great. He got involved with a project at the Museum of the City of New York. I think six or seven photographers were brought together to work with a New York City program that took green market food for poor neighborhoods. Shen Wei’s contribution to that project was a series of tabletop still lifes of produce bought as these green market stands, and displayed on very ordinary table tops, usually with a plastic tablecloth or a very plain linen cloth. So, they were casual arrangements of fruits and vegetables, sometimes with their labels still on, or sometimes with the box showing that they had been bought in. They are really, really beautiful. They have a really nice feel for this very ordinary material. Out of the group of photos that I had looked at, they’re the most classic images of fruits and vegetables on a tabletop. They’re not very precisely arranged, but very thoughtfully arranged with beautiful light.
    Shen Wei is using the most ordinary sort of produce: a pineapple, a plum, long beans, a lot of very unusual vegetables. He allows them to just be. I don’t think he is romanticizing them in any way, but he is really seeing them and appreciating them in a way that totally, for me, elevates the material. He is also seeing them in a very simple setting, often in the containers that they came in or the plastic bags in which they were bought in. He really gives attention to that plastic—it’s almost like it’s drapery sometimes. I love that he is really appreciating this very ordinary material, not trying to make it special but appreciating it for what it is, and for its very simple beauty. It’s almost like Cezanne in a way. You’re going back to a pile of pizzas, and they’re amazing.
   While I was putting the show together, I realized how much was out there. That was also another reason why I wanted to pursue this: I know that I can expand this in a whole other way because I think almost every photographer, at one point, has done something that could be considered a still life. It’s just one of those things that happens."