In the spirit of celebrating creativity, we ask talented individuals around the globe to fill our q&a on whats and hows of their creative process. The third episode is dedicated to a photographer and professor at the University of Chicago, Laura Letinsky and her melancholic style of seeing fragile beauty in the aftermath.
How would you describe what you do?
In my art-making, pictures, porcelain, design, and food, I aim to unsettle the photograph’s promise of perfection, to instead make images that reckon with our frailties, contradictions, and vulnerabilities.
How did you get started?
Back in art school I wanted to be a painter but the incredibleness of the material as it came out of the tube seemed just fine without my intervention. Working in ceramics and photography, I realized I am drawn to processes that involve almost an alchemical transformation, the analog (now digital) photograph, clay, foodstuffs, fabric yardage, a garden bed…. Making photographs is, like words, a kind of language, one that afforded me a kind of fluency and articulation to “speak” to that which matters to me.
Untitled #23, Hardly More Than Ever series, 1999, via www.lauraletinsky.com
A strength or skill you value most:
I’ve never been good at seeing issues in stark contrast, instead, often suffering the complications and nuances of mostly everything. Holding contradictions is to my mind, a necessary component of just getting on.
One of your favourite projects you’ve worked on:
The first photographic series I did that really felt like mine — even if I was in a dialogue with northern 17th century painting traditions, and artists such as Jan Groover and Morandi — was Hardly More Than Ever, pictures of tabletops and scenes not of a cornucopia, but the aftermath of consumption.
Both as idea and as physical space, the dialect between nature or nuture permeates “ home”. Media, especially images, instruct and beguile our notion and realization of this concept and space. Home, and its images reveal who we are as individuals and as a society, hovering between repetition and revelation.
