Personal Interest
The photographer I have been inspired by is Canadian contemporary artist, Laura Letinsky, who is well known for her still life photographs. Letinsky received her BFA from University of Manitoba and MFA from Yale University. Currently she is a visual arts professor at the University of Chicago.
Her photography originally was focused on couples and families in intimate situations in their homes. Gradually, Letinsky began capturing images of table tops that had fruits, objects, trash and kitchen silverware. I always felt more comfortable photographing outdoors and of people or the city. In order to challenge myself, I felt intrigued by Letinsky’s subject shift from people to objects and indoor work. Her photographs caught my eye because many of them were of subtle destruction such as used napkins, stained tablecloths, half eaten meals, etc. They implied that the image was capturing the aftermath perspective of an event, romantic date, conversation, party or fight.
The 4 images I have focused on are mostly from her still life series of table tops. In the first two images of the party balloons and octopus’ dish, I received the sense that there was unfinished business. The messes left on the tables forced me to be an active viewer, to infer what could have happened before the image was captured. The third image of the grapefruit felt more of a symbolic image since some grape fruit juice is left in the cup but also spilled on the table. The fourth image is slightly different from the rest since it’s from one of Letinsky’s series where she uses magazine cutouts to create an image. Her usage of light in said image is impressive since it feels as if the light is framing the magazine cut outs.
Her work seems simpler than other artists’ but also very metaphorical and complex. In a Vimeo interview with Letinsky, she stated that when creating her still life series, she hoped others would receive a bodily sensation from her work. She wanted her audience to be able to interact with the photographs through a first-person narrative position as if they were across from the tables. Her focus in her images are of things that people would never really consider meaningful at first until they sit with it.
