Against abstraction: Zoe Leonard's "Analogue"

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In the late 1990s, Zoe Leonard began photographing the storefronts and sidewalks of her Lower East Side neighborhood. For the next ten years, she assembled an archive of quirky and forlorn scenes. In one image, two tattered chairs stand awkwardly outside a grimy laundromat, while in another image, pink and white foam pillows press up against a glass facade, and in a third, threadbare suits and dresses hang in a dimly lit window display. Comprising over four hundred chromogenic and gelatin silver photographs, Analogue offers vignettes of marginalized discards as well as mass-produced kitsch. In one of the first sustained responses to the work, Mark Godfrey remarks that such objects seem above all to belong to the category of the outmoded, to “a passing era of material and retail culture.”1 Echoing Godfrey's observation, Helen Molesworth describes Analogue as staging the “tension between disappearance and tenacity” of an older mode of exchange—the mom-and-pop store, the corner bodega, the artisan tailor—as it keeps at bay, if only temporarily, the multinational corporation lurking somewhere off-camera.2 This sentiment of loss is the primary tone in which critics have received—and consistently praised—Analogue.
Original languageEnglish
JournalArt Journal
Volume69
Issue number4
Pages (from-to)108–123
Number of pages16
ISSN0004-3249
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 01.12.2010
Externally publishedYes

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