In her three decades as a photographer, Paulette Tavormina has been a food stylist for cookbooks, a Hollywood prop and food specialist, a commercial photographer for Gucci and GOOP, and an art photographer at Sotheby’s. The latter may explain the clear influence that 17th-century still-life painting has had on her work. Bouquets of flowers and bowls of fruit, butterflies and sea shells, blue-and-white porcelain and strung pearls—Tavormina’s tableaux capture the full spectrum of the natural world, from the beauty of blooming peonies to the strange shapes of rotting fruit. As in an Old Master still life, each element contains an allegorical meaning. —Paulina Prosnitz