The setup is classic and familiar: a table draped with a white cloth, a dish of fruit, a sugar bowl. Yet instead of the meal awaiting an unseen viewer's consumption, as in a classic still life, Laura Letinsky photographs what remains on the table after the food has been eaten, leaving only crumbs, melon rinds, a cantaloupe pocked with rot and a half-finished lollipop. Letinsky explores the inextricable relationship between ripeness and decay, delicacy and clumsiness, waste and plenitude, pleasure and sustenance. The influence of Dutch-Flemish and Italian still-life paintings--whose exacting beauty documented shifting social attitudes resulting from exploration, colonization, economics and ideas about seeing as a kind of truth--can be seen here as well. In
After All
, Letinsky explores photography's transformative quality, changing what is typically overlooked into something splendid in its resilience. Poet Mark Strand contributes an essay to this marvelous volume.