The setup is classic and familiar: a table draped with a white cloth, a dish of fruit, a sugar bowl. Yet instead of the meal awaiting an unseen viewer's consumption, as in a classic still life, Laura Letinsky photographs what remains on the table after the food has been eaten, leaving only crumbs, melon rinds, a cantaloupe pocked with rot and a half-finished lollipop. Letinsky explores the inextricable relationship between ripeness and decay, delicacy and clumsiness, waste and plenitude, pleasure and sustenance. The influence of Dutch-Flemish and Italian still-life paintings--whose exacting beauty documented shifting social attitudes resulting from exploration, colonization, economics and ideas about seeing as a kind of truth--can be seen here as well. In After All, Letinsky explores photography's transformative quality, changing what is typically overlooked into something splendid in its resilience. Poet Mark Strand contributes an essay to this marvelous volume.
Featured image is reproduced from Laura Letinsky: After All.
"The title of this book suggests more than the minimalist character of Laura Letinsky’s recent photographs, it proclaims their distance from earlier embodiments of still life. The rotting fruit, wilted flowers, tipped glasses, half eaten meals that are present in such profusion in the 17th Century Dutch painting have given way to paper plates, plastic cups, tin cans and bottle tops disposed on white surfaces in white rooms. Instead of images of overabundance, we are presented with the more modest remains of a snack or a drink or a child’s birthday party…As the book progresses, the photographs become darker and the scattered objects more plentiful. Those accents of bright color used so sparingly near the beginning of the book give way to arrangements that seems less random and spaces that though less ethereal are no less mysterious This literal darkening of the book’s progress echoes, naturally, the passage of time, which only deepens whatever indications there are that pleasure was had and now has passed…"
FORMAT: Hbk, 11 x 8.5 in. / 96 pgs / 55 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $50.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $67.5 ISBN: 9788862081320 PUBLISHER: Damiani AVAILABLE: 7/31/2010 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA LA
The setup is classic and familiar: a table draped with a white cloth, a dish of fruit, a sugar bowl. Yet instead of the meal awaiting an unseen viewer's consumption, as in a classic still life, Laura Letinsky photographs what remains on the table after the food has been eaten, leaving only crumbs, melon rinds, a cantaloupe pocked with rot and a half-finished lollipop. Letinsky explores the inextricable relationship between ripeness and decay, delicacy and clumsiness, waste and plenitude, pleasure and sustenance. The influence of Dutch-Flemish and Italian still-life paintings--whose exacting beauty documented shifting social attitudes resulting from exploration, colonization, economics and ideas about seeing as a kind of truth--can be seen here as well. In After All, Letinsky explores photography's transformative quality, changing what is typically overlooked into something splendid in its resilience. Poet Mark Strand contributes an essay to this marvelous volume.
