Ann Munster Photography: I Will Show You
A Glint of Light

The images in this collection were inspired by my favorite paintings—those of the 17th century Dutch masters. I spent many hours as a child looking at the paintings in my mother’s art books, and in 1971 I went to the Rijksmuseum to see their famous collections.

The dramatic lighting is key to their appeal for me. I was attracted to the window light in the portraits and the sunlight in many of the landscapes. As I began to focus on still lifes in my own work, I noticed that the lighting in a lot of the still lifes is different from the window lighting in the portraits and the sunlight on the landscapes. Working with nature morte allows considerable flexibility for experimentation, and the Dutch painters took full advantage of that. They produced light that one would not see in nature, and many of their compositions involved elements that were never arranged together in a set-up, such as bouquets made of flowers that did not bloom at the same time of year.

All of the images have dark backgrounds, as most of the Dutch paintings do. The subject matter is similar to subjects painted by the masters, and I used some of the same symbolic elements—shells, nuts, a pocket watch.

In addition to the light I am also attracted to the vanitas theme in many of the paintings. The idea that life and beauty are transitory is conveyed through the use of symbols that were inherited from the Middle Ages—shells, butterflies, and other elements that were associated with death and rebirth and also through the use of flowers and fruits that were somewhat past their prime.

I am not a painter. My tools are a camera and a flashlight. I have used them to produce images that are reminiscent of Golden Age paintings and in some cases images that resemble specific paintings fairly closely. All of the images are composites. I took background pictures of my set-ups in the studio and combined them with longer exposures in which I used a flashlight to play with light in a manner somewhat analogous to the way the Dutch painters used their tools to play with light.