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The pictures in this book were made from the mid 1980’s to the present. The large majority of them sat for nearly twenty years in a plastic box disassociated from any specific idea. I took them on the fly while conducting other photo business—editorial, commercial and the like. Only recently did I understand that they are connected to and are the impetus for my current work. They are all still lives made from my passing http://traubstudio.net/in-the-still-life/observations of the real world. All of these images are now transformed by time and new associations and have little connection to any reason for which they might have originally been made. They are ascribed new roles via their ability to stimulate the viewer’s own memories or fantasies of similar passages through the social landscape. I hope that the strength of these images is that they assume different guises for different people yet remain relics (still lives) of the period and places in which they were made. For myself, I do not divorce the illusionary aspect of the photographs from the things that I know are real in the world.
When these pictures were made, I was still in my salad days. A “yute!” “youth!” An admirer! A wannabe! I was looking for me. Hip lifestyles, pseudo spiritualism and pot euphoria teased maturity. Nature was the supposed alternative to the material pursuits and the junkyard of suburbia, but from my service experience I knew all too well the vicissitudes of its wrath. The darkroom was safer than the tent. What Traub had captured with his camera lens took on new life in the darkroom: it became an object of his creation.