Photographs (c) Laura Letinsky, Courtesy: Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York
Laura Letinsky
The Chicago photographer explores intimacy and the 'precariousness' of the domestic world
By Emilie Zanger
Published: February 25th, 2005 | 5:21pm
Laura Letinsky's large-scale color photographs explore the domestic sphere as a careful construction based on the underlying fiction of natural stability. Her best-known portraiture work captures couples in their bedrooms and other domestic spaces, while her latest endeavor consists of still lifes that feature leftover food and used silverware, strewn, as though in the aftermath of a luscious meal, across tabletops and counters. Throughout her career, Letinsky has continued to explore the home in her photographs, both as a physical context to provide a more complete understanding of her human subjects, and as an assemblage of objects that conveys a story all its own.
After completing her undergraduate degree at the University of Manitoba and her graduate study at Yale in the early 90s, Letinsky moved to Seattle to teach at the University of Washington. It was during this time that she began photographing real-life couples in a series entitled Venus Inferred. The series explored Letinsky's interest in, as she put it, “the heterosexual love story myth.” The photographs, all situated in the domestic sphere of the couples' homes, investigate the emotional dynamics between these couples, which vary from tender to wistful to desirous to disgusted. At the same time, the photographs interrogate our ideas about what love looks like, questioning whether these ideas are actual possibilities, or mere flights of fancy perpetuated by the artifice of photography.
Letinsky's latest body of work, embodied in two separate series entitled Morning and Melancholia and I did not remember I had forgotten, are still lifes she created from 1997 to 2004, which picture leftover food, dishes, and utensils on deserted tables and counters, their airy stillness evoking the sense of having arrived five minutes too late to the party. Dense with deep, saturated colors and bathed in natural light, they are hauntingly beautiful yet simultaneously repulsive, the visual decay of neglected food emanating like the too-sweet scent of rotting fruit. Objects often hug the periphery of tables, appearing a fraction of a second away from toppling off of the frame, the construction of the tableau so meticulous that the moment between resting and falling appears to go on perpetually in the stillness of the image. The still life photographs explore the boundary between want and need, gratification and indulgence, and order and chaos. Again, Letinsky chooses the domestic sphere as the backdrop to present these issues.
It was one of those mornings at the Letinsky household, I was informed, soon after I dialed Laura Letinsky's number in January 2005 to speak with her about her recent work and what we can expect from her next solo exhibition, Somewhere, Somewhere, which opens April 29, 2005, at Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago and at Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York in fall 2005. She had contractors working on her home, and her six-year-old son Clyde had stayed home from school with an injured finger — which required a doctor visit later in the day — and a toxic case of cabin fever. All of the domestic upheaval seemed quite apropos, in light of Letinsky's pervasive focus on the fragility of the home in her work.
Photography as a medium -— what do you love about it and what do you hate about it?
Well, the things that I love about it are the things that I hate about it! (Laughs) I love the way that it looks like the world, but it's not. And so, the proximity, the almost-smell, the almost-textural feel to it. You know there's that dumb song about how “I'm in love and all I've got is a photograph,” but the sense that it sets up this image that seems so close, so proximate, and yet it always returns to this flat disappointment. ... I also think about [photography] in terms of desire and how it fuels it. In some ways it seems like the perfect machine to fuel desire because it sets up the possibility of something, but it can never give what it promises. And so, in terms of the way it works with ideas about love and desire, it feeds back into itself…
What do you see connecting the two bodies of work — the intimate photographs of couples and then the still lifes of food and dishes and objects?
Well, a number of things. On a really simple basis, intimacy. I think there is a level of intimacy. In a more metaphoric way, they're about wanting, and the difference and the relationship between want and need. When do you want something and when do you need it? When is something too sweet? When is something too beautiful?
Tell me about Venus Inferred.
I think the Venus Inferred pictures were a lot about how we think about love, based on how we see love pictured. And how love, as an idealized thing, only exists as a picture. You're never really in it, it's always a past moment or a future moment that you're aiming toward, but to be in the present, what would that mean? What would it look like?
Did you know the people you were photographing, and if you didn't, how was that different for you from photographing people you did know?
It started out by being friends, and then it was friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends, and then it would be strangers. I did put ads in newspapers when I lived in Houston and Seattle. It's funny, I kept on resisting the idea that when I knew them it made a difference, you know? That there was some way that I could make a portrait of them that you didn't need to know them ...
In order to feel the intimacy?
Yeah, and part of my feeling was not believing that if I spent two hours with them, that the picture would necessarily say that I knew them any more. … I find that attitude of going someplace and taking a picture of somebody and then bringing it back — I really don't like it. But yet, at the same time, I don't believe that you can capture something by taking a picture of somebody. So I'm a little bit in between.
Did you make a choice to photograph straight couples only?
Yeah, I did make a choice to photograph straight couples only, and the reason is because there's always this tension between photographing all different kinds of couples and being really inclusive, and trying to figure out what I was concerned with. And I guess there was something about the heterosexual love story myth that I felt like I knew more about and I was engaged in. … I was really trying to figure out how gender roles get described and acted out within a heterosexual dynamic.
How did your gender as the female photographer of these shots figure in, if at all?
Definitely, there was a questioning of what it meant to be behind the camera, in front of the camera, offering these pictures. But also how people acted in front of the camera. Like, it was really interesting to me that I think on average it seemed the women felt more comfortable than the men being photographed. And I think it's something about being looked at. … There's a way, I think, that women are traditionally enculturated to not look, to not stare. I mean, even thinking about pornography and the prevalence of pornography, and how it gets divided gender-wise … It tends to get ascribed as being this kind of male gaze. And that interested me, and when I first started trying to make pictures of people having sex, I was photographing for six months before I realized I didn't have one penis in the pictures, in any of the photographs, because I just, like, wasn't looking. So finally I was like, OK, today I'm going to go out and make this picture. (Both laugh)
I'm gonna get one today!
Right!
What brought on the transition from shooting people to shooting still lifes?
I felt, after six or seven years of doing the Venus Inferred work, that I had really explored this theme and the story that I was interested in … [whether] photography, through its very ubiquity, had somehow destroyed the possibility of love as an individual thing. And I was increasingly interested in the spaces around people, more than I was in the people themselves … So when I switched over to photographing inanimate objects, it felt very much like the same problem. It started pretty organically: I was in Berlin in 1997 with my then-partner, and he was working during the day, and I didn't speak the language and was alone a lot. And I loved to cook. I just started to really look at the objects and look at the leftovers. I was kind of in love with the materiality of this different place. I also thought that those things were beautiful, like an empty table or a table after things have been eaten. I've always liked that as a moment.
And then another thing I was thinking about was the proliferation of home magazines, and the way that the home, in some ways, has become another paradigm for identity.
It was strange, but the first time I saw your still lifes, I felt hungry, and it wasn't because it was food. It was because of the beauty of the colors and their intensity, and just everything about them. It made me want … something.
I want there to be this fecundity to them. And one woman bought a piece from me and she was joking that her and her husband debated where to put it, because they didn't know whether they should put it in their bedroom or in their kitchen. And that was like the highest compliment to me! (Laughs)
In a lot of the still lifes, I noticed a particular pattern of the set-up where objects like fruit or dishes or whatever seem like they're balanced precariously on edges of tables that are very empty. They look like they're poised to crash down at any second. What interested you about that emptied-out, peripheral set-up?
One of the things that it does is it narratively charges the frame. You have this kind of precarious situation where things look as if they're about to tilt off the frame. It just kind of feels like things are about to fall apart. And it also underlines that it is a construction… Also, thinking about the precariousness of domesticity and how domesticity is such a really delicate thing, and always requires a lot of work, and it's always threatening to fall apart.
Would you tell me a little about your upcoming exhibition, Somewhere, Somewhere, that is going to be at Monique Meloche Gallery?
Yeah, I'm doing a few different things. The project I'm going to show at Monique Meloche, I've been photographing apartments, people's homes after they move out of them. And so they're similar, they're obviously related [to the still lifes] … I'm interested in the blankness of these places and how they will be occupied again. And thinking about the way that photography is an index of light and then the way that these blank surfaces, empty spaces become another kind of index of what has been there, and yet it's kind of nothing and everything. And also, I've been photographing gardens. … I'm thinking about ideas about trying to make something that's beautiful, and how your aspiration never quite fits; your sort of utopic vision never quite fits with what actually happens.
That same idea of promise and its fulfillment…
Yeah, and the garden also being such a — this whole idea of fecundity and returning to the Garden of Eden, and that seems really compelling to me. Trying to have this idyllic space even though it wasn't a space that ever really existed.
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