Laura Letinsky is a theoretically minded photographer who is sensitive to art history. Her photographic still lifes have all the light obsession of a Vermeer and the lushness of Dutch vanitas paintings, but contain modern Styrofoam cups among natural detritus of orange rinds and rumpled and spilled cut flowers. And her recent photographs of two-dimensional image ensembles construct mysterious relationships and disarrange our familiar associations. Her work is often beautiful and ambiguous and full of the pathos of decay and, as such, suggests the outlines of the photographic medium itself.

Originally from Canada, Letinsky is based in Chicago, where she is a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. She has published and exhibited widely and internationally—most recently at PHotoEspaña 2019.¹ I originally met her during her residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin in the summer of 2017. We Skyped between Berlin and Chicago in July 2019 to reprise some of our conversations about her work and about the photographic medium.

Sarah Goodrum: The first question I have is about the trajectory of your career. Looking across your different projects, I went back to the early images that you made of couples and looked through the various gradations of your still-life images. I was reminded of how you’re always pulling apart the layers of the still-life genre, and I think you are always really caught up with the indexical quality of photography. If I look at your work as a sort of timeline, you’re starting with couples and then you pull the couples out of these scenes, and then you have these sort of abandoned spaces. Then you get into still-life scenes on tables that themselves seem to have been abandoned, and slowly the objects have disappeared and become collage. How did you get …