Laura L. Letinsky (born 1962) is a Canadian contemporary photographer, born in Winnipeg, best known for her still life photographs.
From her early photography of people, she shifted to still life photography for which she is now known. Her 1990’s series, Venus Inferred, of couples were informed by representations, visual and other media, about love and how photography is used to convey our ideas about romantic relationships. Her photographs chip away at normative expectations as depicted in mainstream culture. Impetus for her investigation of the still life was its associations with femininity, the minor arts, and its imbrication within the home as the space of intimacy. Letinsky says that still lifes provides her with the potential to explore the false dichotomy between the personal and the political. Vital to this is the selection/orchestration of objects depicted in her images as well as her photograph’s presence as object. Hence scale and surface is important to understanding these photographs. Rather than their being seen on a digital screen, she is invested in the experience of viewing her actual prints. She says that her work “is in part about the relationship between looking at something and other bodily experiences.”
Letinsky’s still lives are described as “Elegant, subdued and gently but relentlessly off-putting, her large-format photographs have an arresting presence that seems out of step with time. At the same time, though, art history suffuses her meticulously constructed scenes as fully as the softened daylight does the sparse interiors she photographs.” Letinsky’s still lives are reminiscent of Dutch still lives, they bring together “freshness, ripeness and decay.”[4] Although they nod to Dutch still lives, they are more modernized, using “Crumbled Coke cups, styrofoam to-go cartons” instead of the upper-class, lush food of the Dutch still lives.
Letinsky’s large scale work becomes purposeful and melancholy, not about the food itself but more of the photography. “Peaches aren’t metaphors for anything; they are simply peaches, peach-shaped, peach-colored.” Her work is all about the line, shapes, and light interacting and how the view is experiencing the work. These fabricated scenes remind viewers of the ability to be real or fake within a photograph. Just as the 17th century northern European painters were not simply painting lemons and goblets, Letinsky’s work speaks to the value of objects, but more, the valuing of their representation with photography conveying much about what and how to see and look.
