Anne MacDonald's photographic work traverses the Vanitas still life genre, extending historical approaches by exploring the symbolic potential of objects within a contemporary cultural context. The photographic still life builds on the long history of vanitas imagery in art and brings the photograph's new association as memento mori. Photography has a unique connection with still life and death due to its ability to arrest time and literally still life. Photographs also contain a realisation of loss by recording a past moment that no longer exists. Anne MacDonald draws on these associations to create elegiac metaphors for the ephemerality and mutability of existence.