Laura Letinsky kept Polaroid Type 55 film in her Chicago studio from 1997 until the stock was discontinued in 2008, using instant black-and-white prints to test focus, composition, exposure, and light while she worked toward the larger color still lifes for which she is known. The subjects will be familiar to anyone who follows her work: the remains of meals and appetites never entirely sated, ripe fruit and picked-over food arranged on tables after use. What distinguishes this volume is the medium. Time’s Assignation, The Polaroids gathers that studio work under one cover and treats the prints as photographs rather than as preparatory scraps.

The book is published by Radius Books with an essay by Nathalie Herschdorfer. It is a hardcover volume of roughly 9.5 by 11.5 inches. The scale suits material that was never intended for the wall: small, slow, raw, closer to a question than to a finished statement. This way or that? More or less? Now or then? For a photographer whose finished prints tend toward clarity and control, the Polaroids expose the deliberation behind them, the repeated adjustments by which an image is arrived at rather than declared.

Materiality bears on the subject. A Polaroid is a fugitive thing, vulnerable to change much as the fruit and food in Letinsky’s compositions are, and the prints reproduced here have since been stabilized. High-key tones slip toward white veils; darker passages have metallized into hues of taupe, gold, and gunmetal gray. The book therefore holds two registers of time at once, the moment of exposure in the studio and the slower chemical drift that followed it, both bound up with appetite and its persistence.

The value for a collection lies in the conjunction: an underused and now vanished film, a photographer’s recognizable subject, and a working process made visible at book scale. These pictures investigate what a still life can be when its materials are already decomposing. The book secures them a place beside the color work rather than behind it.