Soul Sights and Still Lifes

By Wendy Faunce

Wendy is a junior at Ball State, studying creative writing and telecommunications: video production. Here on The Public Screen, she aims to inform readers about recent and impacting projects of filmmakers, photographers, and other visual artists. 

Photographer Laura Letinsky is best known for her still life-photographs, some of which were recently displayed at the Photographer’s Gallery in London. The photographs, all of which were included in her series titled ““Ill Form and Void Full,” use fruit, dishes, paints, candy, and pastel-colored stains to compile an image that Letinsky describes as highly personal with strong “affiliations with domesticity and intimacy.”

Letinsky focused on portrait photography at the beginning of her career, specifically portraits of couples. While she was able to convey the affection that photography can evoke, she was not settled in the genre. “While I was taking photographs of couples in the 1990s, I began thinking about love, and about how photography relates to love, how it can function within a kind of circuitry of production and consumption… I also wanted to switch from an omnipotent point of view to something that felt more immediate, more first-person.”

Though one would be tempted to think that photographs of candy and fruit would be aloof and reserved when compared to portraits, the photographs simply show the same love of people in a more hidden and almost intimate way. Each item in the picture has been stretched, cut, arranged, or destroyed by someone, giving each item a distinctly human quality. In a sense, these inanimate object photos externalize the inner turmoil we can’t always see clearly below the surface of human interactions. In the same way people changed these objects, they can stretch, cut, and arrange each other’s souls as well.