Christian Boltanski is a French photographer, sculptor, painter, and installation artist. Born in Paris in 1944 to a Jewish father of Ukrainian heritage, and a Corsican Christian mother, Boltanski was attracted to painting and drawing as a young child, and left school at the age of 12. In the late 鈥
Taking off from the Dutch 17th-century still life known as a vanitas, a work containing symbols of mortality, the photographer Laura Letinsky deploys props like half-nibbled sweets, wilted blossoms, dirty glasses and crumb-strewn tablecloths in artfully unartful arrangements that are as flatly unders