Made using the potato-based autochrome photographic process invented by the Lumiere brothers in 1903, they combine the calm stillness characteristic of long, slow exposure with colours of pointillist subtlety.

That these still-life photographs remind us of pictorialist autochromes as well as a long history of still-life paintings, then, just as the large black-and-white portraits look something like Nadar's glass-plate luminaries blown up to Manet and Velazquez size and effect, speaks not so much of retrograde aestheticism as of a rejection of the linear time of avant-garde conceptions of forward-moving-ness and medium definition.