Untitled, from the "Morning and Melancholia" series

Maker Letinsky, Laura U.S. resident, b. 1962 Canada

Date2001

MediumChromogenic development print

Dimensionsimage: 7 1/2 in x 9 3/4 in; paper: 11 in x 14 in

Credit LineMuseum purchase through the Fine Print Program

Object number2002:33

About the ArtistI explore formal relationships between ripeness and decay, delicacy and awkwardness, control and haphazardness, waste and plentitude, pleasure and sustenance. – Laura Letinsky

In her first series of published photographs, titled Venus Inferred, Laura Letinsky took as her subject heterosexual couples intimately engaged and tried to show us what love looks like. Letinsky’s pictures of love are composed of Necco Wafer colors–peach, blue, green and yellow–and contained within an elegant formality. These visual attributes are fully unleashed in her most recent series, Morning and Melancholia, still-life compositions discovered in the remains of daily meals that reference Dutch and Flemish painting. Together, both series of photographs offer an extended essay on fragility, the domestic arena and, according to Letinsky, the photograph’s transformative qualities.

Born in Winnepeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1962, Laura Letinsky received her degrees in photography from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg (BFA, 1986) and Yale University School of Art, New Haven (MFA, 1991). Her works have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. Her works are held in several permanent collections, including those at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago. Letinsky has been a professor at the University of Chicago since 1994.