Laura Letinsky: Time’s Assignation, The Polaroids

Drink wine and look at the moon and think of all
the civilizations the moon has seen passing by…
— Omar Khayyam, 11th-century mathematician and poet

Thirty-Six Views of the Moon is a meditative collection of nighttime exposures. For this project, Ebtekar found and tore out pages from volumes spanning the last thousand years—ranging from poetry and science fiction to religious texts and philosophy—that reference the moon and night sky. He then worked with a photographic glass plate negative of the moon from the Lick Observatory archives in Northern California, treating each book page with Potassium ferricyanide and Ammonium ferric citrate to make their surfaces light-sensitive. Finally, Ebtekar would leave the sheets outside from dusk until dawn, using the UV-light emitted by the moon to create a contact cyanotype print layered with the cosmological texts on the found book pages.

In addition to the thirty-six cyanotypes, this volume features essays by Kim Beil, Alexander Nemerov, and Ladan Akbarnia, as well as an annotated index for this selection of images and a comprehensive bibliography of sources Ebtekar has used throughout the various iterations of this project.

Core’s work is a triumph of multi-level trompe l’oeil — trumping the eye by turning a painting that aspires to lifelikeness into a photograph that aspires to painting.

— Howard Chua-Eoan, TIME

In 2007, Sharon Core came across the work of the early nineteenth-century American still life painter Raphaelle Peale. Peale’s still lifes of fruit, cakes, and vegetables are characterized by an uncanny lifelikeness, a strange animation of natures mortes, an American austerity, and a sense of non-identity, a giving over of a signature hand of the artist in favor of a minute replication of reality. 

Core began a series of photographs titled Early American, in part due to an affinity with Peale’s work, and also because of her interest in examining the ideas surrounding illusionism and trompe l’oeil, and their relationship with photography. Core studied Peale’s paintings intensively through reproductions and tried to replicate as best as possible the lighting, subject matter, and compositional tendencies. 

Core recounts, “I researched and collected period porcelain and glass and grew, from heirloom seeds, varieties of fruits and vegetables in existence in the early 19th century. Through these efforts I hoped to achieve a mirroring of Peale’s painstaking painting process, and the themes that lie under their surfaces.” Much of the meaning of the photographs lies in the gaps between the originals and copies. These differences in time, place, and technologies point towards themes of cultural memory, nostalgia and loss, and ask questions about our perception of the American past.

”Our explorations were slow and quiet meanders, as my father proclaimed the joys of looking at the natural world we passed through. On these walks I learned to love being in nature.” 

— Barbara Bosworth 

Photographs by Barbara Bosworth

Hardcover with tip-inn image
11.5 x 14.25 inches
120 pages / 33 duotone and 15 color images
ISBN: 9781934435601

“Shifts the way we think of the classical still life.”

— Aline Smithson, Lenscratch

Photography by Laura Letinsky
Interview by Lynne Tillman

Hardcover
12 x 13 inches
120 pages / 50 images
ISBN: 9781934435878

Trade: $55.00
Rare: $150.00