Robert Cumming – Studio Still Life

HotShoe magazine n.215 - At the Movies, 2026

Robert Cumming was an artist of seemingly limitless skills who took up photography as a way to synthesize them all. He would design, draw, build and then photograph objects, sets and scenarios that were outlandish but somehow logical in their execution. A bucket falling as if knocked from a chair. A slice of bread embedded in the side of a watermelon. Operable cardboard cameras. A simulation of falling rain, made with painted string.

In early 1977 Cumming received an invitation to photograph behind the scenes at Universal Studios, one of the giant movie production corporations in Hollywood. What he found there was uncannily similar to the crackpot situations and contraptions he had been making alone in his back yard, with the minor difference that Universal was a multimillion-dollar collaborative industry.

Cumming set about photographing this artificial world as if it was his own imagining. As before, he used an 8×10 inch camera, so the level of detail he was capturing was extraordinary. This was the same camera format Hollywood portrait and continuity photographers would use on set.

After several months of work, Cumming produced two handmade copies of a book maquette, each containing 126 immaculate contact prints.