Laura Letinsky built her earlier reputation on photographs of the dining table’s aftermath: a wine glass smeared with lipstick, half-eaten cakes, fruit past its best. Those pictures began at an actual tabletop. The series gathered in Ill Form & Void Full begins somewhere else. Letinsky constructs her table out of references — existing photographs, pages from Martha Stewart, Dwell and Good Housekeeping, her own earlier work, art by friends, and objects themselves. A private scene assembled from prior images is no longer simply observed. The book’s argument, stated plainly on its publisher’s page, follows from that: perception is a construction, and ideas about domestic life arrive already shaped by what came before.
Radius Books issues the project as a 120-page hardcover. The series is the centre of the book, but not the whole of it. Lynne Tillman, the novelist and cultural critic, conducts an interview with Letinsky; Anthony Elms contributes an essay. Together they place the photographs in critical and art-historical company without turning the volume into a survey of the artist’s career. The book stays with this one body of work.
What distinguishes the project is the loop it makes visible. Letinsky, a photographer long associated with still life, stops photographing objects and starts photographing images of objects, then rebuilds the table from those images. The magazine spread, the art-historical still life and the domestic snapshot all become raw material. Collectors interested in the still life’s debts to advertising and household manuals, or in how contemporary photography handles appropriation and the domestic interior, will find those questions posed concretely here rather than illustrated.
Ill Form & Void Full is a focused book about a deliberate turn by an established photographer, made at book length, with a substantial conversation and an essay accompanying the plates. Its interest lies in that concentration: one series, thought through across a sequence, rather than a retrospective’s scattered highlights.
