Untitled #37

Since the late 1990s, Laura Letinsky has been transforming domestic detritus into photographs that imbue the still life—one of the classic genres of Western art—with fresh formal possibilities and contemporary emotional resonance. Letinsky arranges evocative fragments left over from meals into precisely composed photographs that express the tensions latent within the domestic feast: its dark edges as well as its sensual and convivial pleasures. Intimacy and distance commingle within that series of sensual yet subtly uneasy portraits of couples at home.

The intimately paired coffee cups might be read as markers of sweet domesticity if not for their marginalized and cropped placement: the pictures center instead on arcs of crumbs and spent petals that outline now-absent objects.