Zoe Leonard was raised in New York as the daughter of a single Polish mother. She left school when she was sixteen to devote herself to photography. Leonard has been building up a coherent body of work ever since, mainly comprising photo series, sculptures and site-specific installations. Besides being an artist, she is also an influential feminist and political activist. Through a combination of politically charged images, a formal affinity with several well-known predecessors and her resolutely analogue approach, Leonard still occupies an important position in contemporary art photography.
Leonard compares taking photographs to hunting and gathering. Each image is arrived at instinctively during one of her many wanderings. By deliberately not hiding the gaps, dust and flaws that arise during the development process, the artist emphasises her interest in the physical creation of her photographs. She describes them as ‘paper objects’. Compared to her contemporaries, her working method is rather traditional.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Leonard mainly photographed the urban fabric from aeroplanes. Her window or clouds often partly obscure the landscape. The focus is on banal patterns such as streets or railway networks. In the same period, Leonard engaged with international activist organisations fighting sexism and the stigmatisation of HIV patients and non-heterosexuals. Her political engagement is inevitably reflected in her oeuvre. She is fascinated by historical and contemporary representations of women in a patriarchal society and has made, among other things, an ironic/provocative series of upskirt photos of catwalk models.
After her successful participation in Documenta IX in 1992, Leonard retreated to Alaska for two years, where she again photographed landscapes. Back in New York, she continued to explore the link between nature and civilisation. Leonard worked on ‘Analogue’ between 1998 and 2009, a series of some 400 analogue photos in which she documented the disappearance of retail businesses in New York and Chicago. Her chosen visual language refers to that of the famous photographers Eugène Atget (1857-1927) and Walker Evans (1903-’75).
After a break from photography, Leonard decided to photograph the sun in 2010. The first photos in this on-going series still contain the architectural elements that create perspective. Later photographs depict only the sun. Each image bears clear traces of the photographic process – scratches, grains and other subtle flaws – which are reinforced by directly mounting the photographs on the wall. In her focus on the sun, Leonard explores the boundary between figuration and abstraction. In so doing, she not only bends the rules of photography, but also focuses on the core of the medium: the source of all light.
