Like the best of Sudek’s photographs, this meticulously composed still life study is a technical and aesthetic tour-de-force. The image is rendered in the subtly-modulated tones of the pigment process, of which Sudek was a master. Sudek had experimented with various pigment processes in his early years, when his photographs were more Pictorial in style. He returned to the process in the 1940s, enlisting the labor-intensive technique to serve his new and ever more lyrical vision. In the present photograph, the result is a saturated and tonally nuanced print in which the detail and texture of the subject become paramount. This marriage of Sudek’s modern approach to the nearly outmoded pigment process is distinctive of Sudek’s extraordinary work in his later career.
