Cataloguing Mary Stainbank’s Artworks

Last weekend I did something quite unusual. I drove a 1500km round trip from my home to a small farm in the North West province of South Africa (about 80km from Sun City) to do what was effectively a 1 hour product shoot. Because of the distance I had to stay over for 2 nights, so this effectively took me three days in actual time to do.

Why, you might ask?

Mary Stainbank was a very famous South African artist who specialised in sculpture. One of my website clients who is an artist in her own right asked me to help her create a catalog of as many of her works that are in the public domain as possible. As a result of break ins and general governmental neglect, a large number of the sculptures that were once housed at Coedmore Castle (Stainbank’s original homestead in Durban) have found their way to a small farm in the North West, nestled in the Magaliesberg mountains where they are now re-homed in a gallery specific to the Mary Stainbank collection. The sculptures had to be visually cataloged, so my job was to do this.

As you know I am no stranger to taking product photos for a variety of different applications, so it’s not all that challenging for me to shoot sculptures. The biggest challenge I had was making sure that I took all the right gear with me. Not knowing exactly what the room I was going to be shooting in was like, my main concern was setting up a backdrop so that the sculptures could be isolated and then deep etched to remove the background later. I have a portable backdrop and of course I have more than enough lights, but with product photography you never know what you might need, so I ended up packing a ton of items (along with my wife who was joining me for the weekend) into the old Hyundai Tucson and headed out early on a Friday morning for the farm.

We arrived at the farm mid-afternoon and the hosts showed me the old chapel where the new gallery is going to be housed and where I was going to do the photography job. Our lodgings were in a little cottage about 2-3km from where the main buildings of this destination are. It used to be a wedding venue but the owners have turned it into a hiking hub so there are a few trails you can do, even for day visitors. There are 5 cottages and while rustic they are quite well equipped, except for the fact that there is no TV and in my case I had zero cellphone reception so no internet. Yikes!

Outside our cottage.

Above our cottage. We were really in the middle of nowhere. That’s our cottage at the bottom of the frame. I sent up my drone to see how we could get from the cottage to the river as it’s not so easy to see a clear path from the ground, plus there had been a lot of rain in the area that week so the ground was very boggy.

The river is really beautiful with lots of rock pools to swim in.

The next morning I got back to the gallery / chapel at 8am and began setting up a makeshift studio at the back of the room. I have a pop-up backdrop that is white on one side and can be suspended from a set of portable backdrop stands with a centre pole between them. I had packed a long piece of white fabric (full of black paint stains from when I was painting everything in my former studio black) and that I draped over the table that was going to be used to stand the sculptures on.

I had brought 2 Bowens 500W monolights and 2 Godox TT600 speedlights. The key light was going to be one of the a/c powered Bowens units in a collapsible 100x70cm softbox and the other I set up on the floor behind the table to light the backdrop. For fill on the left side of the sculptures I had intended to use a polyboard about the same size as the softbox, but I was having some issues keeping it standing upright, so I decided to use one of the Godox speedlights in a small shoot through umbrella at low power for fill instead. It ended up working out well.

Setting everything up took me just over an hour. I then had two big fellows who work on the farm as carpenters help me carry the busts and sculptures to and from the set. My client was very happy with the outcome. The next phase of the project is to photograph a number of Friezes that Stainbank created on buildings in the Durban area. That one should be a little less logistically challenging!