Tyler Shields — Decadence For Sale

Tyler Shields' Decadence is a 2015 photographic series set within an imagined seventeenth-century French royal court, reimagining the world of Marie Antoinette with the same theatrical, hyper-stylised sensibility that defines Shields' broader practice. Rather than working strictly within his usual contemporary vernacular, Shields shot the series using a fifty-year-old 8x10 view camera alongside various Hasselblad cameras, a deliberate technical choice that lends the images a painterly, almost antique quality suited to their historical subject matter.

The series comprises twelve works staged as scenes from the fictionalised court life of Marie Antoinette, drawing its imagined settings from the Tuileries Palace in 1667 and the Palace of Versailles in 1672. Its narrative premise centres on the role Marie Antoinette assumed after her marriage to Louis XVI, when she was entrusted with entertaining the French court — a role Shields uses as a lens through which to explore excess, performance, and the construction of image within positions of extreme privilege. Among the works is "Let Them Eat Cake" (2015), its title drawn from the famous, if apocryphal, phrase long attributed to the queen, distilling the series' interest in the gap between perceived opulence and historical myth-making.

By translating Marie Antoinette's court into his own visual language of exaggerated glamour and constructed tableaux, Shields draws a direct line between eighteenth-century excess and the celebrity-driven spectacle of contemporary culture. Decadence extends his ongoing interest in staged narrative photography, using period costume and set design to interrogate ideas of luxury, ritual, and the performance of power that resonate as strongly today as they did within the walls of Versailles.