Staged Still Life and Uninvited Guests
Plates I-XXXI is a photobook by Lia Darjes, published in June 2024 by Chose Commune. The book presents 31 colour plates produced through a method that combines deliberate arrangement with documentary chance: food remnants are placed in a garden, a motion-triggered camera is left to record whatever arrives, and the resulting images are shaped as much by the subjects' behaviour as by the photographer's initial setup.
The protagonists are small animals — squirrels, sparrows, field mice, slugs, ants — that move through a scene constructed for them without their knowledge. The tension between the controlled still life arrangement and the unpredictable presence of these garden visitors gives the work its particular character. Colour is used with precision; the palette is vivid but not decorative. Silence is structural. The images read as contemporary still life photography that has absorbed something of the Dutch tradition while remaining firmly grounded in a documentary logic.
Within Lia Darjes's practice, Plates I-XXXI extends a preoccupation with still life that was already present in Tempora Morte, her earlier study of market stalls in Kaliningrad. Where that work exaggerated its subject toward the iconic, Plates I-XXXI is quieter and more contingent — dependent on what the motion-triggered camera actually records. The book was shortlisted for the 2024 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards, one of the more closely watched annual recognitions in contemporary photobook publishing.
Concept, editing, and sequencing are by Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi; design by Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi in collaboration with Perrine Serre. The volume is bound as a section-sewn debossed hardcover and printed in French and English. It sits within the Photobooks catalogue at Lokator100 as a first edition.
About Lia Darjes
Lia Darjes (born 1984, Berlin) lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin. She studied photography at HAW Hamburg in the class of Ute Mahler and continued at the Ostkreuzschule in Berlin, where she completed a masterclass with Ute Mahler and Ingo Taubhorn.
Darjes became widely known for Tempora Morte, a documentary still life study of small market stalls at unofficial street markets in Kaliningrad — a work that established her interest in the still life form as a vehicle for precise, sustained observation. Her first monograph was published with that project.
Since 2018, she has taught photography at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie and has co-directed the institution with photographer Jörg Brüggemann since 2023. She has been represented by Galerie Robert Morat since 2019.
