Jan Groover began her fascination with still-life tableaus as a painter, then switched to photography in the early 1970s. Inspired by the early-20th-century work of Edward Weston and Paul Strand, she began a series of still-life compositions of kitchen items taken with a large-format camera evincing an elegant interplay of shadows and shapes. Groover’s still-life images elevate the mundane over the exotic—here, disposable plastic cups mingle with metal pots and utensils in a dish rack—but each object possesses its own qualities of light, texture, and reflection in balance. At a moment when photography was often equated to capturing a particular moment or action, Groover’s orchestrated tabletop scenes anticipated the work of artists such as Gregory Crewdson, who studied under Groover at the State University of New York at Purchase.
