Laura Letinsky

Laura L. Letinsky (born 1962) is an artist and a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.[1] She is currently based in Chicago, Illinois where she lives and works.

Letinsky’s works contend with what and how a photograph “means” while engaging and challenging the notions of domesticity, gender, and consumption.

Letinsky was born in Winnipeg and received her BFA from the University of Manitoba in 1986 and MFA from Yale School of Art in 1991.

In the 1990s, Letinsky largely photographed couples, which can be seen in her photographic series Venus Inferred.

This work examined the legacy of religious pictorial traditions as they transitioned through the Enlightenment into secular imagery, specifically, that of romance and romantic love.

The ontology of photographs as they relate to production and consumption became an increasing concern.

Walker Evans is cited as an influence because of his interest in the vernacular, as are the artists, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus.

Stifled by the conundrum of the romance narrative with its inevitable failure, especially as it was relayed through the photograph, another kind of failure in that its promise would never be fulfilled, Letinsky transitioned to photographing still lifes.

Following the tradition of Dutch-Flemish still life paintings of the Northern European Renaissance, Letinksy found room for exploration in “its association with the feminine, its characterization as ‘less important,’ its affiliations with domesticity and intimacy.” She realized still lifes could “explore the tension between the small and minute and larger social structures.” Referencing Jan Groover and Giorgio Morandi, this work interrogates the question of meaning as it relates to what is described in the image as compared to how it is described.

That is, what the picture is about is not necessarily laminated onto what is being pictured.

In the process of creating still life images, Letinsky developed a unique aesthetic recognized across her works.

She was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000 and the Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship in 2001.

She is currently a professor of visual arts at the University of Chicago.

In 2004, The Renaissance Society exhibited the long-term series she had been working on since 1997, Hardly More Than Ever, cementing her significance as a critically engaging contemporary artist.

Letinsky stopped photographing for a year in 2009, opting to work in ceramics, textiles, and words.

This turn to more material practice was related to her questions related to the photograph as image and as object.

Returning to photography in 2010, she began work on another still-life series, Ill Form and Void Full.

In this work, she sought to try to “restructure the desire [photography] engenders” by making overt that pictures beget other pictures, i.e. images inform subsequent images.

She was included in the 2019 PHotoEspaña and is a Guggenheim fellow.

In 2019, Letinsky debuted her series, To Want For Nothing, in Chicago.

These images marked a transition away from her domestic table settings and instead, using magazine and advertisement cutouts she creates composite images that explore form as it impacts narrative, and the unrelenting and overwhelming behemoth that is our image culture.

Her work is included in the collection of the Getty Museum, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago.