An exhibition of new photographs by Laura Letinsky will be on view at Yancey Richardson from May 22 through July 3, 2024. An opening reception with the artist will be held on Wednesday, May 22, from 6 – 8 PM.
Letinsky is known for deconstructing the traditional still life to exalt the tattered remnants of domestic life. The work in For, and because of… was made mostly during her 2023 residency in the South of France at La Maison Dora Maar, the former home of Maar, the French photographer, painter, and poet, who was also the romantic partner of Picasso. Inspired by the light of Provence in contrast to the dark weather of her home base in Chicago, Letinsky began a series she titled Who Loves the Sun in which she used natural light together with artificial light to provide her images with a radiant glow. Her subjects included borrowed objects such as a ceramic vase and glassware from La Maison that may have belonged to Maar. The detritus left behind from other artists-in-residence, as well as flowers and weeds growing nearby also found their way into her images. Yet, her photographs are not necessarily about what objects appear within them but rather about the medium of photography itself.
Letinsky explains, “I make pictures of very ordinary things in a way that destabilizes and questions the camera’s authority while also indulging in its sexiness, solicitating a visual pleasure that is tethered to other senses.” Letinsky complicates the singular point of view of the camera by building frames within frames and precariously positioning objects in relation to one another. In reference to her innovative picture spaces, Letinsky notes, “Cezanne’s still lifes described objects from multiple perspectives so as to refer to perception being a constantly shifting process. I try to harness this, to articulate that we’ve two eyes and are ambulant living beings.”
Laura Letinsky (born 1962, Winnipeg, Canada) received her BFA from the University of Manitoba in 1986, and MFA from Yale University’s School of Art in 1991. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Denver Art Museum; The Photographers Gallery, London; and Mumbai Photography Festival, India. Public collections featuring Letinsky’s work include the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Art, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Yale University Art Gallery; and Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography.
Letinsky has received numerous awards, including the Canada Council International Residency (2014); Richard Driehaus Foundation Award (2003); Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2002); and the Guggenheim Fellowship Award (2000). Publications include To Want for Nothing, Roman Nvmerals, 2019, Time’s Assignation, Radius Books, 2018; Ill Form and Void Full, Radius Press, 2014; After All, Damiani, 2010; Hardly More Than Ever, Renaissance Society, 2004; and Venus Inferred, University of Chicago Press, 2000. Letinsky has held teaching positions at a number of prestigious American colleges, and since 1994 she has been a Professor in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Chicago. She lives and works in Chicago.
Learn more here.
“The Polaroid, now anachronistic, is here conjoined with Laura Letinsky’s still life’s subject: the remains of appetites never entirely sated.”
Photography by Laura Letinsky
Essay by Nathalie Herschdorfer
Hardcover
9.5 x 11.5 inches
180 pages / 70 images
Laura Letinsky made this collection of black-and-white images in her studio from 1997 until 2008, when Type 55 Polaroid film was discontinued. Akin to sketches, Letinsky’s work explores focus, composition, exposure, and most importantly, light itself, leading to her larger scale color works, for which she is best known.
Small, slow, and raw, these pictures reveal a process of asking. This way or that? More or less? Now or then? Insistently beautiful in their decomposition, now stabilized, their high key tones slip into a white veil, with the darker tones metallized in hues of taupe, gold, and gunmetal gray.
In their subject and materiality, these images bespeak of time’s rapid and unrelenting progression. Their black-and-white ravaged descriptions—coupled with their singularity and seriality—bespeak of the distance between having and wanting. These images are an homage to and lamentation of time’s passage as it is seemingly ensured and enshrined through the photograph’s exegesis.