Laura Letinsky: Hardly More Than Ever
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Shot between 1997 and 2004, her series of 31 untitled C-prints makes no show of documenting turn-of-the-century revelry: Letinsky is not telling us that she loves to entertain and hates to clean up. Yet “Hardly More Than Ever” seems to savor ruins graced by morning window light in the interval between her guests’ departure and her housekeeper’s arrival. Maybe she’s a voyeur or archaeologist of the mess in other people’s places–a natural follow-up to her earlier series, “Venus Inferred,” consisting of studies of couples in their bedrooms during moments of intimacy, including poses of lovemaking. There are no human figures in her new series, but I pretend that they’re asleep elsewhere in the house or apartment and that Letinsky has quietly let herself in to take shots of the leftovers from last night’s party, setting up her four-by-five-inch camera on a tripod for exposures of up to half an hour.
Letinsky’s studies of couples felt like freeze-frames from melodramas by an independent filmmaker: the highly orchestrated details of posture and decor implied resonant narratives. The book of this series contains an interview with Letinsky, who calls the photographs of Larry Clark and Nan Goldin “gorgeously impure.” This apt expression applies not only to the disarray of the lives on display but also to those diaristic artists’ ambiguous status as “pure” documentarians. “Gorgeously impure” also conveys the look of Letinsky’s limpid still lifes of messes–a series that might be called “Chaos Inferred.”
