Laura L. Letinsky Redefines Photography Through Beauty, Perception, And The Poetic Power Of Mundane Objects
Photo: Laura L. Letinsky’s Captivating Still Life Photography Transforms Ordinary Objects Into Extraordinary Studies Of Beauty And Desire
Exploring Desire, Memory, And The Unexpected Elegance Of Everyday Life
Laura L. Letinsky’s photography transforms overlooked objects into profound reflections on beauty, consumerism, and longing, blending philosophy with visual brilliance to challenge perceptions of photography and material culture.
Laura L. Letinsky is nothing short of a force in the world of contemporary art, a visionary whose work transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary while challenging the very nature of photography itself. Renowned for her exquisite ability to turn remnants of daily life into profound meditations on beauty, memory, and desire, Letinsky’s work is both deeply intellectual and visually arresting. Throughout her illustrious career—spanning celebrated monographs, international exhibitions, and a collection of prestigious accolades—she has expanded the boundaries of photography, blending its seductive allure with a critical exploration of perception, consumerism, and the fleeting nature of human longing.
In this interview, we delve into Letinsky’s unique trajectory, from her early portraits of intimate relationships to her groundbreaking, deconstructed still lifes. With the precision of an alchemist and the insight of a philosopher, she invites her audience to linger on life’s leftovers—the forgotten, the mundane, the flawed—and, in doing so, imbues them with a haunting elegance. From series like Hardly More Than Ever, where she reframes the overlooked remnants of daily living as poetic reflections, to Ill Form & Void Full, where she reconstructs fragments of existing media to create new visual truths, Letinsky continually pushes the boundaries of how we see and what we value.
It is impossible, of course, to overstate the scholarship and depth underpinning her practice. Drawing on influences as diverse as 17th-century Dutch still lifes, Enlightenment-era philosophy, and contemporary cultural critique, Letinsky’s work reveals the relationship between objects, images, and a pervasive societal hunger for “more”—a hunger both unquenchable and beautifully human. At the same time, her teaching at the University of Chicago underscores her commitment to fostering dialogue, self-reflection, and exploration—aspects that also resonate within the dynamic layers of her oeuvre.
Laura Letinsky’s photography is more than a delight to the senses; it is a clear invitation to engage: to pause, to consider, to reimagine. Through the lens of her vision, we see not just art but the world—one ripe with possibility, tension, and the kind of beauty that makes even the fleeting and imperfect profoundly meaningful. It is our honor to bring her voice and her artistry to you in this issue of WOWwART magazine.
How has your exploration of photography’s relationship to reality influenced the evolution of your work from photographing people to focusing on objects in still life?
In my photography, I’ve always been aware that the photograph is not real, it is a point of view, monocular, excerpted from a continuum, and framed. Over the years, what was an inkling has become concretized for me even as photography’s ubiquity, really, omnipresence has made us inured to its fantasy.
When I worked on my earlier series, Venus Inferred, photographs of heterosexual couples, I was smitten, literally, I’d fallen in love, and also, with the plenitude of imagery that, beginning with depictions illustrating the bible morphed into the stuff of Calvin Klein advertisements. Through readings, I learned of the philosophical shift through the Enlightenment from the sacred to the secular. Likewise, imagery followed this trajectory, from gorgeously described pietas and San Sebastians’, pierced by arrows, to that of erotica and fashion.
“The photograph is not real; it is a point of view, monocular, excerpted from a continuum, and framed.” –Laura L. Letinsky
My interest to the still life shifted, also as an engagement with 17th century Northern European painting. These images were a response to that part of the world’s colonialist acquisitions of wealth and their cultural inability to absorb this wealth, which was not the case in the south, although that part of the world had perfected the perspectival system as a means of describing, authoritatively and seductively, social morays and edicts. In the north, instead, to show fabulous objects along with the ordinary was to speak to the glory of all of God’s creations, and functioned also as seduction and authority to educate the masses that if they too worked hard, they too would garner these fabulous objects. The need to disseminate these images along with a sense of the real, mimesis, demanded the invention of photography. And leads us to where we are today where pictures of things, people and places fuel a desire that is always only a promise. Undeliverable because it is removed from life and living, but wanted, and so a perfect partner to our present capitalist world of more more more along with obsolescence because even if you get that designer jacket or pair of underwear or hamburger, desire is not sated.
Is this too much?
I have this shrillness in the background while also revelling in the seductiveness of photography, of futzing with what it beholds so that my images are, I hope, both beautiful and unsettling.
In your Hardly More Than Ever series, you focus on overlooked details of daily life. What do you hope viewers take away from these intimate observations of remnants and refuse?
As I mentioned, I was smitten with historical paintings including the dutch Flemish still lifes and the world they portend. As an early globalist, capitalist culture, these images are rich with promise. And I couldn’t help but think of where we are now, post global, post modern, post capitalist…. What is left? So instead of the cornucopia those paintings hold, I wanted to consider what remains, where and what are we now? The left over is both something you can’t get rid of but want to, like a stain, as well as something you want to hold onto but can’t, a lover, a smell, a taste….
The perfection of today’s contemporary images of the home seemed altogether unreal to me, impossible ideals that feel deadening to life and change and being. I wanted to make what is considered undesirable, desirable. It’s a riff on Susan Sontag’s argument that photography makes whatever it shows beautiful. While she’s discussing a journalist’s war image, I agree, and wanted to harness this aspect of photography. To have people appreciate that which they would usually rush to hide, to sweep away, to show, dare I say, the beauty of the mess, of what resists, of what remains.
This characteristic of the remain is discussed by Roland Barthes in his incredible Camera Lucida, a book that changes each time I re-read. He speaks to the photograph as the “that-has-been”, yet. not the past as it exists as a photograph, an image, an idea and an illusion. That nonetheless is irrevocable in its presence.
Can you discuss the role of perception in your work, particularly in your series Ill Form & Void Full, where you incorporate elements from existing magazine images?
Perspective, perception, is neither neutral nor natural.
Having worked on Hardly More Than Ever, After All, and a couple of other series, I reached a point of disenchantment with photography. It was 2009, two years after the smartphone, facebook, IG, snapchat, etc, and I felt drowned in all the imagery, nauseated really by is omnipresence that did not bring revelation, rather, repetition. I had stopped making pictures for a while, turning to the materiality of ceramics, making dinnerware, Molosco, that is now a side hustle of mine.
I began to play with the flatbed scanner and cut out images, enjoying the flatness of the light that stripped away the elegiac and romantic qualities of light that I’d become dependent upon. I wanted the scanner’s “democratic” seeing, and employing Robert Heineken’s comment , from the 70’s, that the world didn’t need any more pictures because everything had already been photographed, I used others’ images to build mine. This quickly evolved into my series, Ill Form and Void Full in which I stage still-life like spaces using images from advertising as well as editorial and other artists. Perhaps all advertising, because, as Orwell said, all art is propaganda. What was mine? To describe the tangle of want and need, sustenance and lust…. Hopefully in a way that is complicated and rich pleasure.
Your work often involves transforming mundane objects into subjects of beauty and study. How do you choose which objects or scenes to photograph?
Most of the things I photograph are those I’ve collected over the years, either by choice or by gift. I’ve a relationship to them, mostly of like. I wanted to speak to home as revealing, more so I think than a picture of a person. Even or especially those highly curated homes tell so much about the person who lives within that space, and, or but, my home is a mash up of things I’ve chosen, and those I’ve stumbled upon either through need or a gift. Dishes I’ve made, silverware from my ex’s parents ex-marriage, a fake marble bowl that glows, the lollipop my kid didn’t like so left for me to picture…. Efforts and aspirations and accidents. This is home in the best sense methinks.
For some years, 1997-2002 I made work that was more collage-like but realizing I detested those materials, and that as an older female artist, not as many were looking at me so I could do whatever I wanted, I decided to only photograph that which I loved. Sans explanation.
As a professor at the University of Chicago, how has your teaching influenced your creative process or approach to your own art?
I confess that I like teaching. I enjoy continuously being challenged as it helps me articulate what I genuinely care about, as well as shifting my point of view to consider others, as well as our changing world. At a young age, I lost a parent and the sense of life as transitory was deeply internalized. I’m happiest when I can be flexible, pivot, resist and shift. Yet I also recognize that its hard to do this, calcification much more comfortable even as I believe it can also be toxic if one holds too tightly.
The University is a complicated space of learning but also, it’s a business; I try to stick to the places where I can be effective within the monolith that is the campus, working with students, making my work, dialogue, books, exchanges, and indulging my curiosities.
With exhibitions in museums globally, how do you see your work resonating differently across diverse cultural or geographic audiences?
This is an interesting question; Norman Bryson writes of the commonality of the table even with its widespread differences. A surface upon which a bowl/platter rests, forks/knives/chopsticks, substances that “taste good”, taste also being enculturated. But still, digestible, providing sustenance, sweet, savory, sour, fermented, spicy…these elements are not entirely infinite.
I admit a western European sensibility, and am super interested in how globalization affects and influences us. For example, the concept of terroir is on the one hand, an effort to hold on to distinct traditions and geographies but it makes for an elitism as only a few can indulge in, for example, champagne from that specific region in France. For champagne to be available at Costco for a wide audience requires mass production which diffuses the idea of specificity but it is more democratic. Walter Benjamin wrestles with this sense of aura in his essay about photography, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in which he both celebrates and laments the demise of aura with the advent of photography.
There’s no avoiding the widespread acceptance of photography even in the face of aniconism practiced amongst certain religions. We all look at pictures, heck, we are all photographers. Yet, like words, not all words spoken are poetry, and not all pictures are profound. I like poetry and profundity…
REVIEW
Laura L. Letinsky’s captivating still life showcases a quietly profound exploration of decay and vibrancy. The composition features a vibrant orange heirloom tomato juxtaposed with a wilted sunflower, resting on a stack of white plates. Accompanying elements, such as a pale garlic bulb and empty shells, emphasize the passage of time and natural entropy. The stark lighting highlights textures and contrasts, inviting contemplation of beauty’s transient nature. This arrangement evokes classical art’s timeless elegance while offering a modern reflection on life’s ephemeral qualities and the unexpected beauty found in decline.
