"Tableaux Vivants" translates to "living pictures" from French, and Ryan Schude utilizes this genre's quality of telling many different stories within a single image. Viewers are expected to analyze reason behind every characters' gesture, while they are left alone with ambiguous situations at times. In this series of work, stage design, costume, light and acting come into prominence.
The first ten photographs of the series have different features in terms of concept and production. Over a six-year period, all of these works were carried out with different collaborators, emerging independently from each other. The stories are told from a broad perspective, covering disappointments, humor, mystery, conflict and daily entertainment within them. They were taken both in real places and studio sets which were built from scratch, and were inspired by literature and cinema.
The last five photographs are constructed by the inspiration of Ryan Schude's family experiences. The photographs, which were planned for a year and taken over five days, are on the subject of the difficulty of maintaining the family as a lonely mother, after the divorce of Nicole, the sister of the photographer. The works involve both semi-fiction and semi-true stories, reflecting the beginning of a new production process.