Canadian-born, Chicago-based photographer Laura Letinksy is a master at understated still life photos that celebrate the remnants of meals at a table. At first glance, the pastel colors and sometimes almost abstract forms at inviting. On closer inspection, you see that the subjects have been picked at, pulled apart, and generally abandoned, awaiting cleanup at a later time. Nevertheless, Letinsky’s photos are beautiful.
It’s no surprise that Laura Letinsky has long been intrigued with Dutch-Flemish and Italian still life paintings. In 1997, she started a series of 4″ x 5″ photographs that were experimental elaborations of details from an earlier series about couples. She noticed that they depicted scenes of meals she had prepared and consumed–after the fact. She describes them as “unexpectedly beautiful tableaux of dirty dishes and messy counter-tops,” noting that the formal arrangements were “almost classical in an art-historical way.” Indeed, there were also “assemblages of completely banal personal details of appetites, habits, and implements.”
Over the years she has continued the project, photographing tables in New Haven, Rome, Berlin, and Chicago. Rather than romanticizing the gorgeousness of uneaten food, she is “curious about those domestic objects and spaces that are touched, devoured, and discarded.”
Letinsky, who received her M.F.A from Yale in 1991 is a professor at the University of Chicago. She is represented in NYC by the Yancey Richardson Gallery, and other fine galleries around the world. Here is a sampling of her work, starting with a piece from 2009, going back to a 1998 work.
Untitled #2, from the series Fall, 2009.
Yancey Richardson Gallery
Untitled #3, from the series Fall, 2009.
Yancey Richardson Gallery
Untitled #1, from the series The Dog & The Wolf, 2009.
Yancey Richardson Gallery
Untitled #11, from the series The Dog & The Wolf, 2009.
Yancey Richardson Gallery
Untitled #23, from the series The Dog & The Wolf, 2009.
Yancey Richardson Gallery
Untitled, 2009, Italy
Galerie m Bochum
Untitled, 2009, Italy
Galerie m Bochum
Untitled, 2009, Italy
Galerie m Bochum
Untitled #22, from the series To Say It Isn’t So, 2007.
Yancey Richardson Gallery
Untitled #118, from the series Hardly More Than Ever, 2007.
Yancey Richardson Gallery
Untitled #117, from the series Hardly More Than Ever, 2003.
Yancey Richardson Gallery
Untitled #80, from the series Hardly More Than Ever, 2003.
Yancey Richardson Gallery
Untitled #63, from the series Hardly More Than Ever, 2002.
Yancey Richardson Gallery
“Untitled #64” from the series “Hardly More Than Ever,” 2002.
Yancey Richardson Gallery
Untitled #37, from the series Hardly More Than Ever, 2001.
Yancey Richardson Gallery
Untitled #54, from the series Hardly More Than Ever, 1998.
Yancey Richardson Gallery
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