TESSA TRAEGER

Tessa Traeger is one of the outstanding still-life photographers of her generation and is widely acknowledged as having raised the subject of photographic, food still-life to the status of art. Trained at Guildford School of Photography and Fine Art, Tessa Traeger has worked at Rossetti Studios in Chelsea, London since the 1960s.

As an artist, she is especially known for her still-life photographs taken on large format cameras many of which were published during her long association with British Vogue. Inspired by some of her illustrious predecessors, Tessa Traeger has sought to balance the demands and developments of both commissioned and experimental work.

She has exhibited regularly since 1978 in Paris, London and New York as well as participating in many group shows. Her work is represented in the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliotheque National in Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Citibank collection in London.

In 2003 she worked on a commission from the National Portrait Gallery to photograph the leading British horticulturists of the day and their inspirational gardens, which resulted in 50 portraits being acceded to the National Collection, an acclaimed exhibition at the N.P.G. and a book, A GARDENER's LABYRINTH, written by Patrick Kinmonth and published by Edward Booth-Clibborn Editions in English, German and Dutch.

Over the last fifteen years she has been working in the mountainous Ardeche region of Southern France to record and celebrate the life of the people who live there and the food they produce. This project culminated in an artist's book of the work, entitled 'Voices of the Vivarais' which supported her solo exhibition at the Purdy Hicks Gallery in June 2010. The book was winner of the Photographic Book Prize in the British Book Design and Production Awards 2010, and is available from the studio. It was selected as Book of the Year by the eminent philosopher, Professor Anthony Grayling.

"For me the art book pick of 2010 is the large format collection of Tessa Traeger's loving, funny, mischievous, penetrating, beautiful and scrupulously composed observations of contemporary peasant life in France's Vivarais, that hidden upland region where the wheels of time turn very slowly, and the 19th century still exists.

In her monochrome images the creases and wrinkles of weathered faces and hands, the textures of bread loaves and baskets, the etched surfaces of onions, the rain-beaten, sun-shrivelled wood of barns, the unfussiness and pragmatism of life lived close to mud, dust, goat hides and chicken feathers, are all minutely scrutinised. But the moments captured by her lens are not informal; to the contrary, they are staged with the care of a performance at La Scala.

Symmetries & textures work joint magic on Traeger, and she sculpts both with light, in infinitely patient arrangements of great power."