Laura Letinsky

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.

Laura Letinsky's photo series Hardly More Than Ever records, in the style of Flemish still-life painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the aftermath of human consumption, capturing sunny tables against white walls, crumbs, orange peels, melon rinds and candy wrappers. Like her forebears, Letinsky evidences human presence through its absence, suggests death through decay (in this case, of peonies and half-eaten toast) and tacks on a moral message about the obscenity of abundance, of having crumbs to leave. Also like her forebears, she contradicts those messages implicitly, or at the very least complicates them, by making art that feels very likely to last, to withstand the effects of time. Recent photographs of formal flower gardens and empty rooms on moving day, with a shelf, a shade or a surge suppressor left behind, explore similar issues. Letinsky, who teaches at the University of Chicago, studied photography at Yale and has been a Guggenheim fellow. Her work has appeared at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museums of Modern Art in San Francisco and New York.