Zoe Leonard

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gyuribacsi

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Hello community!

I have just visited an exhibition about Zoe Leonard in Munich. So if anyone of you know her body of work, please tell me your opinions about. I think I am an uneducated man a bad photographer and therefore I can`t understand the photographs of her, not the artistic concept or the punch line of the most very poor quality photos shown at this exhibition. Only few of their photographs are telling me a little story but the most are quite random.
Please note, I don`t want to be aggressive in any way, I just can`t understand what some well known critic have written in the accessory book. I`m just unable to see the most of what is written in the pictures shown.
So please help me and educate me. I´m really interested to learn.

Regards
George
 
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For a better look at the work of the person in question, check this out.

I'm mostly withholding judgement until I've had a time to take a deeper look. All I can say now, strictly off-the-cuff, is that it's not knocking me out, but it's hardly the worst I've seen...some interest me a lot, while a good many others don't. Still interested in looking a bit deeper.


- Barrett
 
Great and outstanding work! I love her.

It's easy to shoot a 'good photo', thats what this forum is all about. Get the technique right, buy the latest gear, 'learn' the so called rules of composition. take some classes. Buy a DSLR (even easyer). Shoot some postcards of sunsets, Edward Weston type nudes or some trees in Yosemite. Go even advanced and do the street route, TRI-x and all that... all endlessly walked paths...

But to develop consistency and a spirit, plus exactly that moment of 'I don't get it - but I am somehow touched' is what divides the good photographer (and there are thousands out there, on assignment, delivering the magazines, and the graves of stock agency's, knowing every trick of the trade) from the true artist.

But I can imagine why the show was hard to get: no flashy large-scale prints with perfect gradiation, just some small prints, rather grainy and mundane, in a really decent and elegant museum. Leaves the people unimpressed if you expect to be overwhelmed.


remember: The true artist reveils mystical truths
quote by Bruce Nauman.

Maybe you should go there a second time?

Regards, Michael
 
Very eloquent Roger. I agree.

If you see work in a museum, and its presence there makes you feel like "an uneducated man a bad photographer" a second trip & some reading might be in order. It would be a very easy answer if you were indeed both those things or if the work was indeed bad inscrutable or incompetent.

I think some photographs - Ansel Adams might be an example - read very quickly as lovely art objects.

Other works operate as documentary objects of an aesthetic concept. Their craft is in the quality of the idea, and the object then becomes illustrative of that idea rather than of an aesthetic or technical pinnacle in and of itself.

Her photos are random in that they attempt to document the loss of randomness in cities - the human hand creating out of necessity rather than mass marketing.

In the old days, NYC (where a lot of her photos were made) was a patchwork quilt of the efforts of "mom & pop" stores and solo businessmen to market their wares to passers-by through the use of signs, either created by sign-painters, neon makers, or a brush & bucket on wood.

Now we have a Starbucks on every corner. The signs and such are trucked in from somewhere, probably pre-fabbed in China, and each Starbucks looks (give or take a bit of square footage) pretty much exactly like the next Starbucks a block down the street.

What's more - stores now tend to look like other stores, because they are as mass produced as the products they sell. The decorations, the signage, the fixtures, etc.

The loss of randomness as exemplified by the hand-made sign or the individual store-front is what the work of Zoe Leonard both documents and laments. So in a sense, what might be missing technically is filled-in, as it were, by nostalgia. But I actually like her "hand-made" looking shots, because they reinforce the hand-made, analog (as she suggests) randomness that she is documenting.

The photos are as hand-made as what they represent.

Plenty of artists hire technical assistants (Chuck Close, Jim Dine, etc.) in order to get the technical appearance they want in an object. Leonard could have just as easily hired a photographer as a technical assistant and directed them to take Alec Soth-like images of each store front she selected using her framing and her compositional arrangement. So I think the look is an intentional choice, not an absence of skill. It re-inscribes its subject matter with itself.

There was a terrific show at the Tate a while ago called Cruel and Tender. It featured the work of a number of photographers who worked within the inherited language of the early catalogist, August Sander. Along with the work of Sander was shown the work of Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Paul Graham, Andreas Gursky, Boris Mikhailov, Nicholas Nixon, Martin Parr, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Thomas Ruff, Michael Schmidt, Fazal Sheikh, Stephen Shore, Thomas Struth, and Garry Winogrand.

I wondered then why no Zoe Leonard. I think her work would have made a lot of sense in among these other photographers, perhaps not as a technician (though again, I am of the mind that her output is purposeful in its technique ala Roger Vadim's differentiation above) but as a concept-driven expression.
 
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amazing work... I bought her book "photographs" around 6 months ago, after I saw her exhibition at the "Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland"! Quite impressive... her Black/White photographs are 100% different than her Color stuff...

good video link on bottom of the page -> Zoe Leonard vernissage, Munich

http://www.channels.com/items/show/4777032/Christian-Boltanski?page=4
 
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I can't overlook the amount of nostalgia in her photos and also in the explanation submissions here and I'm a bit surprised (but not so much). I often read that great photography is not about the subject, but in this case it's just the subject just with only one relation – the viewer's own memory. I'm afraid that once the viewer's gone so will the relation to this world. I like her photography, the honest view, but I'm just shaking my head after reading words like "most exceptional artist". I know many introduction texts starts with this, but is this cliché really needed?
 
So are you saying that nostalgia is bad? Because I think that nostalgia is inextricably part of photography, each photo being an image that has past and been lost. A memento mori to the present. I can't see nostalgia as a pejorative unless the emotion it seeks to elicit is merely the saccharine emotion of a greeting card.

And while the photo preserves for the viewer what has gone, the viewer isn't obviated from their responsibility to bring at least a little life to the content in the photo. This isn't advertising, which dominates or dictates.

Zoe Leonard could as easily use Bratislava as her subject as NYC as the Zaras and Humanics push each indigenous "obchodni dum" out.
 
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None of the photos on this page, New York Public Library Online Exhibitions, had any people in them. People are, amazingly, the most interesting subjects for photos of nostalgic topics especially. Photos that don't grab me or allow me to connect, to try to create some sort of understanding visually or a fairly strong appeal to my emotions, without a requiring a somewhat wordy explanation, don't stand on their own. You can come along and say that anything that I don't understand must be art, and the less I comprehend it the greater it must be -- but this approach is what dressed the king in invisible clothes: I'm just not seeing it.

BTW, the 'artist' has control of the dye transfer process which is fairly difficult. I'd like to see her use the tools to make more universally meaningful work....

TenOx
 
It's been said that once the photograph is taken it's already old. Nostalgia is indeed part of photography. I can see changing world and passing time in many photographs through all the history, it's kind of added value. From my point of view this Analog collection of Zoe Leonard takes and presents this single essence. What I see is visual tautology – "this is shop", but nothing more. It fills me with sentimental feelings, but is it enough?
 
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I wonder if sentimental feelings are perhaps a valid defense against the (perhaps) inevitable spread of a unified field of mercantilism. They are irrational and therein lies their analog nature. Our rejection of them as invalid or lesser may be the same sort of rejections that lead to homogeneity through urban renewal.

i think the concern that objects stand on their own is a valid one, though I think the definition of "stand on their own" changed once art stopped being figuratively referential. The argument may instead be about where the context of the object should be allowed by the viewer to begin and end. In some work, that context may not be limited to the mere physical object but may also include referential connections to other objects, ideas or histories that in turn require further study to understand. I would agree that the referential connection should be perceptible by the viewer, but I am not sure whether that includes a passive viewer unwilling to study those referred to objects, ideas or histories.

Thus, I think that perhaps Zoe Leonard's work is not just photography, so looking at just the photographs is missing a portion of the context in which they operate.

Or to flip this around, what many viewers may find themselves nostalgic for when visiting a contemporary museum is the classic viewer-object relationship of a moment spent standing in front of a Caravaggio, its figures & drama easily discernible as human even to someone hurrying to the cafe for a snack. And that nostalgia would be just as valid as another patron's enjoyment of several hours spent digesting the work of Joseph Kosuth. They are not mutually exclusive reactions.
 
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Hello and thank you so much for all your kind posts. Now I have a very different view an the work of Zoe Leanard. It was apperantly due to the little bit sloppy work of the musuems curators and the very few photos without any information about the concept of the artist that gave me the strange first impression. Now, after reading all your post and some interesting websites about her, I have got the point and can understand the intentions of the mist of her pictures.

Many thanks for your help!

Regards
George
 
They are dye transfer prints so they might look better in real life. But the photos of shop fronts are really unremarkable. If I saw them on Flickr I wouldn't take a second look. Once you get into the fine art world things get weird, it's really about social clubs, identity groups, who you know, in a word: corrupt. For every artist who succeeds on merit, there are ten who are just good at being fashionable and networking.
 
jke said:
The argument may instead be about where the context of the object should be allowed by the viewer to begin and end.
In some work, that context may not be limited to the mere physical object but may also include referential connections to other objects, ideas or histories that in turn require further study to understand. I would agree that the referential connection should be perceptible by the viewer, but I am not sure whether that includes a passive viewer unwilling to study those referred to objects, ideas or histories.

Thus, I think that perhaps Zoe Leonard's work is not just photography, so looking at just the photographs is missing a portion of the context in which they operate.

Or to flip this around, what many viewers may find themselves nostalgic for when visiting a contemporary museum is the classic viewer-object relationship of a moment spent standing in front of a Caravaggio, its figures & drama easily discernible as human even to someone hurrying to the cafe for a snack. And that nostalgia would be just as valid as another patron's enjoyment of several hours spent digesting the work of Joseph Kosuth. They are not mutually exclusive reactions.
Click to expand...

Good points! The drama of the spectator is as least as important to the work of Zoe than the (well thought and soul-fed) photographs itself.
As I said, to put up a flashy show it just takes an good image editor (like Richard Prince was once) and access to all the Stock agencies. Maybe that is the crucial 'sentimental' aspect of Zoes work: all photography became image editing, editing the prejudices and expectations of the spectator.

On the other hand: it is really not easy to make a good show in a decent gallery or mayor museum: these places are truly haunted by history - they are loaded with imaginary pictures and a history of representation - and the desire for quelque chose nouveaux, for the next hot ****.

I can still remember visiting the Documenta 10 in Kassel, back in '97, where she was replacing 18th century pictures in a museum with small B/W prints of close-ups of female genitals. I hated that back then, I thought, allright, so whats so interesting about 40 badly printed pictures of vaginas... I thought (back then) ah... thats just the next hot **** thing... boring... but time and the honest (sic!) work of Zoe just proved me wrong.

I think Zoes aproach is rather valuable (as our discussion proves).

cheers
 
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Melvin said:
Neither. The OP is wondering why he doesn't get the work, and I'm saying it may just be because the work is bad, and it only gets shown because of art world politics. Believe it or not, it happens.
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It happens. BUT: it also happens that someone's art is subtle or complex, and at first glance it appears there is nothing to it. An unsympathetic viewer quickly concludes that the work is lauded only because of some corrupt reasons.

This is unfortunate. It's happened to me: some artist's work appears to be pointless. Later, i realize there was a lot there, but I was not receptive enough or knowledgable enough to see it. My loss.
 
I really like this thread, good stuff, keep it coming. Jke I love what you said

Their craft is in the quality of the idea, and the object then becomes illustrative of that idea rather than of an aesthetic or technical pinnacle in and of itself.
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Great!

martin
 
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