Zoe Leonard: Radical Reversibility

Abstract

Six camera obscura installations by New York-based artist Zoe Leonard, made between 2011 and 2014, offered spaces of imagination that were both primal and timely. These darkened rooms, with their wondrous projected images, did not ‘redefine photography’ – an untenable claim that is all too readily made in the discourse of contemporary art. Rather than look at photography and its many technologies categorically, it would be better to assess the perceptions that individual photographic works afford on the technological situation of their time. Leonard’s installations threw into relief the false interactivity and utter commodification of the self that dominate in today’s e-culture – problems addressed in recent writing by Jonathan Crary as well. They heightened awareness of our fleeting human vision, leading to an intensity of thought and feeling without a portable or recorded image. With their invitation to contemplate reversibility at several levels – including, importantly, the switching between oneness and aloneness that stands at the heart of a living community – these works permitted a critical and poetic respite from conventions of our all-too-mobile moment.