Book: Zoe Leonard Photographs

Text: Birthe Havmoeller, Feb 26, 2010

A monograph: ‘Zoe Leonard Photographs’

Now I have got my copy of American photographer Zoe Leonard’s monograph: ‘Zoe Leonard Photographs’. The book was published in 2008, when she had her first mid-career retrospective show at Fotomuseum Winterthur in Austria. The book is richly illustrated with Zoe’s mostly B/W photos (from 1984 – 2008) and there are essays about her photography and other art projects. The authors mention Zoe’s gendered works – i.e. the photo installation, which Zoe calls her ‘pussy pictures’, (an installation that made a stir at Documenta IX, in Kassel, Germany in 1992, and gave Zoe her international breakthrough), and her photos of peculiar objects for example the female anatomical wax models or a head of a bearded woman in a bell jar.  Zoe integrated sexual politics in her works in the 90’ies, but the book as such is not particularly queer. What you get is a thorough presentation Zoe’s very personal way of looking at the world.

In the beginning of her career as a photographer in the 80’ies she made a lot of aerial photos and one of these photos was chosen for the cover of the book (see above).

Zoe is an analogue photographer. Zoe’s silver gelatine hand printed B/W photos look somewhat rough. I can see that she loves the ‘sandpaper-patina’, which especially the blurred areas of her pictures have (comming from the negative’s silver grains). When everybody went digital in 2001, she bought an outmoded Roleiflex medium format camera and started documenting the vanishing storefronts and shop windows of old New York – a body of work ,which she titled: Analogue. And by now her ‘Analogue’ project has grown into a huge body of almost 400 colour photos (!)

Zoe Leonard is only quoted a few times in the book, which I think is sad. I would have loved to learn more about her photography from herself, but this is what one of the books authors tells us that Zoe says about her photography:

 ‘I’m trying to take the simplest pictures possible. These objects all have a story to tell. I want the pictures to be as simple as possible so the story can tell itself. (…) Now these new pictures are sort of still-lives. They are slow pictures. They have required a real patience from me. The ideas feel so big to me – they are about the essentials of life: food, death, subsistence, metamorphosis, survival… These are big slow questions. Now I want to look at the whole picture.’ 

 And with this quote I invite you to dig in and explore her photography.

Details About The Monograph
Zoe Leonard Photographs
Texts by Urs Stahel (Author, Editor), Elisabeth Lebovici (Author), Svetlana Alpers (Author)
Photos by Zoe Leonard
Hardcover: 264 pages
Publisher: Steidl & Fotomuseum Winterthur (March 1, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 3865214940
ISBN-13: 978-3865214942