Sunday Entry: Laura Letinsky

Canadian photographer Laura Letinsky draws inspiration from classic Renaissance paintings. She was born in 1962 and did not start taking photographs until her late teens. While at the University of Manitoba, the artist wanted to study painting but did not have the necessary prerequisites for the class; she had to take a photography course instead. She became enamored on the idea of making a photograph, instead of just taking one, and furthered her studies at Yale, where she received her MFA. Originally, Letinsky's artwork captured intimate scenes between couples. She captured private, sexual scenes, which eventually featured the artist herself, until she was awarded a Guggenheim Grant and was able to study in Rome. Surrounded by such a fertile atmosphere, Letinsky began to study Renaissance paintings closely, and was particularly interested in Leonardo Davinci's "The Last Supper". After noticing the importance of the food on the table in that painting, Letinsky began to stage photographs of just tables spread out with food, their dinners having left halfway through a meal. Even without people in the images, their is a distinct sense of their presence. The food left behind is often devoured halfway, as if the tables were still inhabited. The lighting in these scenes is cool and "angelic".

What I find so powerful about these scenes, is the way the viewer has to imagine just what situations took place at these meals, and why they were left in such a state. The absence of people in the series is striking. Laura Letinsky's I did not remember I had forgotten series was recommended to me because of a series I made last year, which featured a similar sense of absence. I created a series of tableaux featuring the remnants of child's birthday party. One of my scenes is similar to Letinsky's in that it depicts an abandoned meal of cake and ice cream. All of the young revelers have gone and left fallen decorations and wrappings in their wake.




http://www.yanceyrichardson.com/artists/laura-letinsky/index.html

http://www.houkgallery.com/letinsky/letinsky1.html

http://www.mouthtomouthmag.com/letinsky.html