by Ellen von Unwerth
Peaches, Rouilly le Bas, 2002
Artist: Ellen von Unwerth
Made at Rouilly-le-Bas in 2002, this photograph gathers three women on a low stone ledge outside a weathered French farmhouse, each caught mid-bite into a ripe peach. Ellen von Unwerth stages it like a stolen summer afternoon: broderie anglaise and floral cottons, vintage stockings, sunlight pressed into silver by black-and-white film. The peaches are the whole event, passed and eaten with an unforced, conspiratorial ease.
Read as fine art, the picture is about appetite and its pleasures, the peach standing in for ripeness, summer and a frank enjoyment the women own rather than perform for the viewer. Von Unwerth borrows the vocabulary of the mid-century pin-up and hands the agency back to her subjects, who look at each other and the fruit, not the lens. My reading is that the wit sits in that refusal of the camera’s gaze, so if the studio has stated a different intent for this frame, defer to it.
Her technique serves that looseness, natural light and a reportage spontaneity keeping the staging from ever tipping into a set-piece. It suits a considered interior, a dressing room, study or private hallway, where its intimacy rewards close looking, and it will appeal to collectors drawn to fashion photography’s crossover into fine art. Ellen von Unwerth’s work is held as limited-edition photography, each print part of a controlled edition rather than an open run.
Size: medium
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