I just need to visually see something I love today and as someone who's original love is and always will be photography that usually means photos. I love photography, pure no digital manipulation, because no matter what it is truth. Even if it was set up and staged it existed for a moment as you see it and that is always a comfort for me.
I have always loved the work of Laura Letinsky as her work reminds me of how breathtakingly beautiful a mess can be. Of course her work is highly stylized, made with an incredibly sophisticated knowledge of still life and with careful planning. But in the end it is still sticky lollipops, rotting cantaloupe and dirty dishes and it is f**ing beautiful.
Her choice to embrace white, minimal composition and "the mess" makes me fill with a calm every time I look at it. Since I myself am venturing back to some still life imagery in my own work I am really being drawn to it in others works and she just seems to keep popping up. See a recent NY times article on her new found success in the "commercial" world here.
One of my most favorite photographs that I ever took has similarities to her work, see it here. But unlike a staged image this was taken the morning after a small thanksgiving dinner and is the true remnants of an evening with guests. I am definitely more interested in documenting real moments of mess that are beautiful but those of course are a little harder to find.
One quote I found about her work:
Still life is unavoidably an engagement with and commentary
upon society’s material-mindedness. Laura Letinsky’s photographs of
forgotten details such as wrapping paper, plastic containers, Styrofoam
cups, cans, leftover food bits, and found trinkets remark upon these
remnants of daily subsistence and pleasure. Of major influence are
Dutch-Flemish and Italian still-life paintings whose exacting beauty
documented shifting social attitudes resulting from exploration,
colonization, economics, and ideas about seeing as a kind of truth. But
instead of the traditional allure of a meal awaiting an unseen viewer’s
consumption, Letinsky photographs the remains of the table so as to
investigate the precarious relationships between ripeness and decay,
delicacy and awkwardness, control and haphazardness, waste and
plenitude, pleasure and sustenance. What is looked at is "after the
fact," what (ma)lingers, what persists, and by inference, what is gone... Little bits and pieces hover in white grounds blown
flat by blinding light, later lurking in deep inky grayed out pools.
Light, through its abundance and its absence, can record and reveal as
well as obscure and exaggerate. Formally, through degrees of control and
chaos, the domestic scenes Letinsky photographs are redolent with the
allures of domesticity (safety, comfort, familiarity) as well as its
dangers (boredom, satiation, lack of desire). These liminal images are
not intended as accurate visual description, rather aspiring to describe
another kind of sensing. What one sees is not always visible and
Letinsky explores photography’s transformative quality, changing what is
typically overlooked into something splendid in its resilience."
If only all the mess in my life could be so beautiful.
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