Laura Letinsky

From Portraiture to Still Life—Thinking About Intimacy Beyond Facial Expression

Letinsky studied at the University of Manitoba and earned an MFA in photography from Yale University. She has taught at the University of Chicago since 1994.^*18In her early series Venus Inferred, Letinsky photographed intimate relationships between men and women. Dissatisfied with a method that tied romance and desire directly to the human figure, she shifted her emphasis toward still life in the late 1990s. In an Aperture interview, she describes this transition through her interest in genre, embodied perception, and the reuse of her own images.^*5Yancey Richardson’s artist materials frame the move from photographing people to working with objects and still life as the starting point for her inquiry into what a photograph is.^*9Her University of Chicago faculty profile describes a current practice that also includes ceramics and textiles.^*16

Why the Aftermath of a Meal?—The Time After Use That Arranged Still Life Leaves Out

Portraiture concentrates intimacy in faces, bodies, and touch. Still lifes arranged before the camera present the beauty, ownership, and symbolic meaning of objects through a completed composition. Both leave the disposal, empty seats, cleanup, and absence of relationships that begin immediately after desire is satisfied outside the frame. Letinsky chose the moment after plates had been soiled, food crushed, and people had left. The Renaissance Society exhibition and catalog connect the question of what remains from the previous night’s table with the question of what remains of the tradition of still-life painting.^*7By removing people and asking viewers to read relationships through the distances between plates, stains, leftovers, and empty seats, Letinsky shifts intimacy from expression to the traces of shared use. Her official series description links seeing, wanting, having, and knowing through the things that remain after daily meals and pleasures.^*8She chose the aftermath of a meal to use the still-life tradition of material abundance to ask what remains once consumption is over.

Hardly More Than Ever—Making Debris a Contemporary Vanitas

In Hardly More Than Ever, white tablecloths, used dishes, fruit peels, lipstick marks, and tilted glasses appear in unstable arrangements within broad areas of empty space. The Photographers’ Gallery identifies links among seventeenth-century painting, the large-format camera, after-meal scenes, death, unfulfilled desire, and melancholy.^*6Letinsky relocates the abundance and signs of death found in classical still life to disposable containers and contemporary kitchenware, showing abundance and waste as simultaneous conditions at the same table. She has also discussed still-life painting as a central reference for her work.^*3An exhibition at the University of Manitoba presented the after-meal table and the later use of printed images as transformations of a continuous inquiry.^*11An Indiana University exhibition likewise surveyed her still-life photographs from 1997 to 2012.^*10

Pale Light and Unstable Composition—Introducing Hesitation into Advertising Appeal

Soft natural light, nearly white grounds, and muted color keep leftovers from becoming dramatic images of misery and create surfaces close to refined product photography. In a conversation with Musée Magazine, Letinsky speaks of experiencing the photograph as a physical and conceptual entity and of the need to slow the consumption of objects and images.^*1Her statement addresses the overall speed at which photographs are consumed. In the work, plates cut off by the frame, tilted tabletops, and broad areas of empty space share the image with controlled color, slowing the eye’s convergence on a single product-like object.In Untitled #52, held by the Amon Carter Museum, the diagonal of the tabletop and the empty space dominate the composition.^*14In Untitled #60, in the MFAH collection, the slant of the space registers more strongly than the vessels or food.^*15

Reading Domestic Consumption and Cleanup Through After-meal Traces

In an interview with TIME, Letinsky describes domestic life as an idea continually made and remade.^*17The statement frames the home as a space produced each day through objects and habits. The images identify no particular person responsible, but they retain traces of preparation, use, and cleanup. The photographs therefore present the home as a place where consumption and maintenance recur. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s Diaries of Home likewise presents her work as joining private memory to social roles within domestic space.^*2

The Large-format Camera—Comparing Detail and Placement Over Time

Letinsky works with a large-format camera in a controlled interior, adjusting placement, the plane of focus, and changes in light over time.^*6The resolution of large-format photography gives fruit and stains a tactile presence, while its slow process creates time to compare the positions of dishes and cloth repeatedly. The apparent disorder of a finished meal emerges through an exchange between observation and composition. This process allows the photograph to operate as both a record of objects and a designed pictorial field.

The 2009 Pause—From Consuming Subjects to Consuming Photographs

Photographing the remains of meals brought waste and absence after consumption into the image. Yet the finished large-format print itself entered the art market as another beautiful object to be owned. Around 2009, Letinsky paused her photography while considering this contradiction. In Musée Magazine, she explains that questions of responsibility within consumerism led her, the following year, to begin working with “photographs of photographs.”^*1MCA Chicago’s 2012 exhibition presented the after-meal still lifes and new works incorporating cutouts and reproduced images as a single turning point.^*12Turning the subject into residue did not resolve photography’s own production of desirable objects. Her later work therefore introduced magazines, reproduced photographs, and fragments of her earlier images into the photographic setup alongside actual objects.

Ill Form and Void Full—Collapsing the Distinction Between Objects and Printed Images

In Ill Form and Void Full, cutout plates, fruit, and fields of color from magazines and art reproductions are combined with actual tables and vessels, then photographed again. A still life made only from objects can suggest that the photograph transparently presents the thing itself, concealing the extent to which desire has already been taught by printed matter and advertising. When cutouts and objects coexist before the camera, an apple and a printed apple become the same plane in the photograph, destabilizing the assumption that a photograph of an actual object is inherently more trustworthy. The Photographers’ Gallery describes the series as an unstable coexistence of two- and three-dimensional forms in which positive and negative space exchange roles.^*6MCA Chicago likewise notes that the introduction of reproduced imagery complicates the perception of pictorial space.^*13Through this form, still life moves from arranging objects to examining an image environment in which objects, reproductions, advertising, and art history generate desire together.

Treating the Photograph as Both Image and Object

The edges of cutouts, curling paper, shadows, and traces of tapeshow that a photograph is a material surface.An interview in PhotoMonitor explains that the series developed across Renaissance painting, collage, and contemporary image circulation.^*4The initial puzzle of identifying the “real” object and the reproduction reveals how both ultimately enter the same photographic surface and the same circuits of circulation.

At the Intersection of Vanitas, Advertising, and Conceptual Photography

Before Letinsky, the history of still life already included decay, death, waste, and ordinary kitchen objects alongside orderly displays of commodities.Western vanitas painting addressed decay and death, while Irving Penn turned food, refuse, and objects found in the street into precise photographic still lifes. The Met’s Still Life with Watermelon, New York provides a precedent moving between commercial photography and fine-art still life.^*20From the 1970s onward, Jan Groover used kitchen utensils and sinks to make color, reflection, and cropping into formal problems for photography. MoMA records the strong response to her 1978 kitchen-sink still lifes.^*19Letinsky brought this history to bear on after-meal consumption, domestic repetition, and an image economy in which photography multiplies reproductions.

How Advertising Appeal Reveals Desire and Waste at Once

Letinsky has explicitly spoken of the need to slow the consumption of objects and images.^*1The pale palette and precise printing invite the desire to look, possess, and arrange; leftovers, stains, and empty seats add the time after use to that impulse. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents her as an artist who approaches the home through both diaristic record and the arrangement of objects.^*2In Ill Form and Void Full, thin shadows and the appeal of the cutout create a simultaneous sense of possession and emptiness. The Photographers’ Gallery centered its exhibition on the picture’s flatness and ambiguous space.^*6

From the After-meal Table to Photography’s Sense of Possession and Lack

Letinsky’s contribution to photographic history extends beyond introducing leftovers as a subject. First, she reread the abundance traditionally presented as a finished still life through used plates, stains, and empty seats. She then brought into the work the contradiction that these photographs were themselves beautifully printed objects of possession and consumption. In Musée Magazine, Letinsky speaks of experiencing photography as a physical and conceptual entity and of the need to slow the consumption of objects and images.^*1TIME described Ill Form and Void Full as “photographs about photographs,” in which the distinction between objects and printed images becomes uncertain.^*17The project that began at the after-meal table eventually asked what still-life photography shows, what photography makes people desire, and what it makes them feel they possess.

The Relationship to Painting—Treating Citation as Part of Contemporary Image Circulation

The Dutch still lifes and vanitas paintings Letinsky references brought together fruit, ceramics, silverware, and flowers gathered through trade with decay and skulls that signaled the transience of wealth. Contemporary tables likewise bring together food transported over long distances, disposable packaging, and idealized food images from magazines, forming chains of consumption and waste. The Renaissance Society catalog treats the leftovers from the previous night and the residue of the still-life tradition as the same question.^*7When Ill Form and Void Full uses art reproductions and cutouts from lifestyle magazines,art history circulates on the same plane as advertising, printed matter, and digital images.Alongside claims of a “revival of still life,” the work addresses how the genre produces desire as it moves among museums and markets, homes and advertising.References to painting no longer function as credentials that elevate photography.An essay by the Renaissance Societyreads Dutch still life retrospectively as a photographic way of seeing.^*7Letinsky’s images allow viewers to compare past pictorial conventions with contemporary household goods, packaging, and printed matter, and to trace how each acquires desire and time.