Grace Walker VCU Senior Port: Laura Letinsky

Laura Letinsky was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1962. She studied photography at University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, where she recieved her BFA in 1986. She then went on to recieve her MFA from Yale in 1991. Letinsky has had work exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottowa, to name a few. Letinsky’s first series of published photographs were titled Venus Inferred, and consist of intimately engaged heterosexual couples, in Letinsky’s attempt to show the viewer what love looks like. According to the Museum of Contemporary Photography, “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.” The Museum of Contemporary Photography then goes on to say that both series of photographs “offer an extended essay on fragility, the domestic arena and, according to Letinsky, the photograph’s transformative qualities.” Letinksy is currently teaching at the University of Chicago, where she serves as a Professor and Chair.