JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART

zoe leonard

Laura Cottingham: The work that you first started to show, say
five years ago, looked like low-tech American secessionist work,
like Weston or Stieglitz or early naturalist photography.
Zoe Leonard: I couldn't be farther from a Weston aesthetic. The
heir to Weston is, not in terms of content but formally, someone
like Mapplethorpe.
Cottingham: I was thinking more of the types of objects and
places you used to like to photograph the ocean, the aerial
nature shots . . .
Leonard: But Weston is about a kind of perfection. It's about
the light falling perfectly on that pepper, about sensuous shape
and form. What attracts me in photography is not so much a fine
arts approach, but rather photographs as documents. Not only
journalism but the other roles that photography has played
outside of the art context: aerial reconnaissance photography,
science and medical photography, family snapshots. All the ways
in which human beings have documented the world in an attempt to
order it, in an attempt to consume it or rule it or hang on to
it in some sense.
Cottingham: But, you're obviously not interested in a formalist
exploration of photography. Your photographs are so antiformalist.
Leonard: I don't think of my work as anti-formalist. I'm not
really that interested in positioning myself against other
artists, other art forms, proving them wrong. I make the work
that I make because it's how I think. These are things that move
me. This is my kind of beauty. I like things to be startling in
a quiet kind of way. I've evolved a technical language that
works for me. I shoot black and white. I print full frame. I

never retouch. I usually shoot many pictures of any given

subject and then take months or years editing down, finding the
picture that works. I usually work with images for a long time,
printing them different sizes, trying different papers,
chemicals, exposures until I figure out a final print. There are
many formal decisions. The idea is to get the formal aspects to
work with the subject matter.
Cottingham: By formalist aesthetic, I'm referring to an
overdetermined formalism. I don't mean "no form." Coming from
me, 'anti- formalist,' 'low tech' is no insult but artists get
so defensive when I say "low tech" because hyper-formalism is so
entrenched as a priority in our aesthetic system.
Leonard: But, I don't think that form and content can be
separated. Aesthetics don't happen in a vacuum. If you like a
Chanel suit, there's a whole set of reasons why you like a
Chanel suit.
Cottingham: Aesthetics aren't just fashion or perhaps they
are, but they aren't only that. Or perhaps, fashion isn't only
fashion is more what I mean. But are you arguing against my
comment that your photographs are low tech?
Leonard: No I wouldn't argue that. But my work is absolutely
grounded in a certain formal approach. These aren't drawings.
They're not paintings. These are photographs. I want the viewer
to be aware of that. That's why I always print full frame. If
there's a scratch on the negative, I leave it there. The
roughness in my prints is my way of letting the viewer into my
process, the process of photography. I think that photography
has been considered a poor relation to fine arts for far too
long. The highest compliment you could pay a photographer is to
say, "Your work is so painterly". If I wanted to paint, I would
paint. My work is about taking pictures, using a camera to
observe what's out in the world. So I present them very much as
they happen in the camera: they're not matted, they're not
framed, they're not cropped.
Cottingham: But that's my question: is the rudimentary technique
a cue? A cue to the viewer to look to the associations around
the image, not the technical virtuosity that either is or isn't
there in the art object as it has been produced?
Leonard: Yeah, it's about providing a cue. But if we're going to
talk about this, we should start with the basic question: Why
photography? Why this medium? Of course there are many uses of
photography, artists like Cindy Sherman who essentially document

a performance, or photojournalists like Susan Meiselas or Donald

McCullum, or fine artists like Penn and Weston. For me
photography is intrinsically about observation. It's about being
present in and having a certain perspective on, the world around
me. It's not so much about creating, or my imagination as
drawing, for instance, may be. It's more about responding.
Choosing to look at certain objects or situations. It's not just
what I'm looking at but how I look. Photographs play with the
idea of absolute truth. When people look at a photograph, they
believe it. We believe that it exposes reality. That a portrait
can show someone's true character. If you see a picture of
something, you believe it really happened that way. Pictures are
proof. My photographs crawl along that edge. I document the
world, but from my own biased point of view. I want to draw the
viewer into the process of looking so we can look at these
things together. I want to show you what I see. I take pictures
of what moves me. Sometimes it's beauty the waterfalls, the
ocean. Things that fill me with awe. Sometimes it's gathering
evidence, spying on our culture. Things that scare me or disgust
me or make me angry. The one part that's frustrating is if I'm
feeling a certain way or want to express certain thoughts, I
have to actually find something out in the world that visually
conveys that to me, something to take pictures of.
Cottingham: In the museum images the viewer relationship is
already contextualized by the fact that you are photographing
museum artifacts. So you have taken something that has already
been framed . . .
Leonard: I'm reframing. Asking people to take a second look. Not
just the objects themselves but how they are displayed. I took
pictures in the natural history museum in Venice. There were
rooms stacked with animal heads. There were no labels or
information just the walls covered, floor to ceiling, with
trophies- mounted heads and animal pelts and stuffed animals on
the floor. It was creepy and disgusting. It says so much about
the people who assembled this collection. This is not a display
about natural history. It's about hunters and collectors. About
a need to own and control. And so, by implication, it is about
us. Later, I started photographing in medical history museums. I
first saw a picture of the anatomical wax model of a woman with
pearls in a guidebook on Vienna. She struck a chord in me. I
couldn't stop thinking about her. She seemed to contain all I
wanted to say at that moment, about feeling gutted, displayed.
Caught as an object of desire and horror at the same time. She
also seemed relevant to me in terms of medical history, a gaping
example of sexism in medicine. The perversity of those pearls,

that long blond hair. I went on with this work even though it is
gory and depressing because the images seem to reveal so much. I
was shocked when I came across the bearded woman's head. I
couldn't believe that here was this woman's head, stuffed and
mounted, in a jar. The bell jar was just sitting on a file
cabinet in a corner of the room, in an obscure museum in Paris,
a place completely closed to the general public (it is part of
the School of Medicine at the University of Paris). Her head was
placed in the jar to be looked at. But it's not just her head
that I see. I see the bell jar, the specimen identification
card, the carved wooden pedestal. I see a set of implied
circumstances. Who was in charge? Who put this woman's head in a
jar and called it science? I am moved by her, anxious to know
more about her life, the quality of her life. But, these
pictures don't tell us all that much about her. You cannot see
her or know her by seeing only her severed head. These pictures
are about our culture, about an institutional obsession with
difference. Those anatomical models were made in the seventeenth
century, and that woman was put under the bell jar in the late
nineteenth century, but I see these images as contemporary,
because the system which put her head in a bell jar is still in
place. The world just hasn't changed that much.
Cottingham: How did you ever get from taking pictures of clouds
to taking pictures of museum artifacts, from taking pictures of
"nature" to taking pictures of "culture"?
Leonard: I take pictures of whatever fascinates or compels me. I
still photograph nature. But, you know, in a way I think the
AIDS crisis and getting involved in activism pushed me in a
different direction. Not in an obvious way- my work is not about
AIDS and most of my work isn't even overtly political, but I
just became filled with rage. I began to question things more,
and to want to look at history, to examine the structures of our
world, the systems and people that make it so unfair and so
cruel. That's when I started the medical history stuff and began
to feel connected to those images. I've also felt tremendously
inspired by the work of a few people, David Wojnarowicz in
particular, who began to be confrontational and demanding with
their work without ever letting go of their own sense of beauty.
Cottingham: The first time I saw the bearded woman photograph, I
thought it was a man wearing a lace collar. Well, of course,
that's the point. Because we assume we know the gender caste
system of the nineteenth century that includes clothing and
personal accessories that are strictly gender-coded, either the
beard or the lace are taken to be "out of sync." It's

interesting that I decided it was culture (the lace collar), not

nature (the beard) that was "wrong."
Leonard: What I think is interesting about that piece is that
there is no proof of gender in the bell jar. That could be a man
with earrings and a lace collar on. I was told that it is the
head of a bearded woman, but there is no proof of gender in the
head. So the real question about that piece is: what is this
head doing here? If there's no proof of gender, there's nothing
to study, no scientific purpose. Why is she in the bell jar?
When I was at the museum, all that Professor Delmas would tell
me was that she worked in a circus and she died at the turn of
this century. I want to know what she's doing here! I want to
know more about her life and her treatment after death. Did she
donate her body before she died? Did she get any money? Did she
sign some sort of agreement? Did her family? Where is the rest
of her body? Was it buried? How did the museum acquire her and
why? I'm still trying to get more information.
Cottingham: I see a connection between the "bearded woman" and
the Documenta piece because, basically, you put her genitals in
the museum. In a way, you put "her gender" in a different
museum.
Leonard: I hadn't thought about it before in those terms, but
there is a connection. In fact, at one time I had thought about
installing the bearded woman pictures in the Neue Galerie. Both
pieces evoke a woman's presence in a powerful Western
institution. The Documenta piece is clearly more aggressive and
irreverent. I had an opportunity to actually intervene in the
museum. I had a lot of fun doing that. Preserved Head of a
Bearded Woman is a more serious piece for me. It's a really sad
piece and also makes me furious because I can show you what
happened to her, but I can't intervene. Because she's dead. I
feel a lot of responsibility for how I work with her, how I
represent her. She has no say in it at this point.
Cottingham: What about your installation at Documenta? What
responsibility do you take for representing the women you
photographed?
Leonard: Oh, come on Laura, these women were alive and awake.
They knew exactly what was going on and supported it. Mostly
they wanted to see the photos and get copies.
Cottingham: The Documenta installation seems to be most
coextensive with the fashion show images, such as the Geoffrey
Beene image shot from underneath, where the female model's

pantyhose crotch is visible. You seem to be adopting, or trying

to adopt, a "male" eye a gaze that subordinates women into
objects. Is that to make the images more marketable? Is the
fashion-show crotch shot related to your Documenta piece?
Leonard: Well, I guess so. For starters they're both crotch
shots. Both pieces are bolder and more caustic than my previous
work. I kind of let go a little, let myself be more humorous,
aggressive. They both have a certain tension between what I'm
supposed to be seeing and what I'm actually looking at. In both
instances, I began with one idea and ended up with something
else entirely. I wanted to photograph fashion shows, I had all
these ideas about adornment and entrapment, theories about
buttons and corsetting. So, I snuck into a bunch of the
collections the big fall fashion shows. I had absolutely no
intention of looking up anyone's skirt. I shot tons of pictures
well over a hundred rolls of film. The most charged moments
were completely unexpected. When a model's dress flew up and I
could see her underwear. That was interesting. Those turned out
to be the best pictures. I worked with those and dropped the
rest. At Documenta, it was also largely instinctive. When I
first went to Kassel, the Neue Galerie was not one of the sites
offered to me. But something intrigued and bothered me about the
paintings. The sober, airless rooms, the satiny wallpaper. I
thought this could be interesting. I had feelings I wanted to
get at, but I wasn't sure how. I wanted to bring myself into the
gallery. And a strong female presence, address women as artists,
as objects of art (models), as viewers of art. The paintings all
seemed like a monologue, all going one way. I wanted to inject
my point of view, make it a conversation. I wanted to make
something positive and strong. The museum made me uncomfortable,
and I wanted to get at that. See if there was a way I could
change it. As a kid, I wanted to be Van Gogh. But sometimes at
the Met, I would want to be one of the beautiful women in the
paintings. I was torn. Do I want to be Picasso or do I want to
be one of these beautiful women. Which is more satisfying? Do I
even have that choice? I used to leaf through this one book of
Man Ray photographs in a virtual stupor over Meret Oppenheim and
Lee Miller. Of course, at the time I had no idea that both of
these women were artists. Similarly, at the fashion shows, I
watch the models. I desire them, I envy their beauty, I pity
their objectification and I am disgusted by the whole ritual
simultaneously and in equal measure. I had a much more
complicated set of images planned for Documenta, but about six
days before I went to Germany to install, I realized that all
these complex impulses were contained in one image: a woman's

sex. That one image would be both passive and aggressive, that
it would represent the invisible, but implied sex of the women
in the paintings, the non-existent female artists, and the
never-addressed sexuality of the women in the paintings. So, I
called up every woman I knew well enough to ask if I could
photograph her pussy. Six women agreed. We shot the pictures in
the next three days, I printed them, and arrived in Kassel
carrying about ninety prints in my bag. It wasn't really what
they had expected. I decided to take down all the portraits of
men, and the landscapes and replaced them with the photographs.
There are some paintings with men, but they are either
peripheral or engaged in very specific interaction with the
women. One man sits next to his wife as she breastfeeds; another
is painting a portrait of his wife (she appears on a canvas in
the painting); another is visiting Cleopatra on her deathbed.
Once the genitalia went up, the whole gallery seemed to shift.
Relationships between the photos and the paintings were amazing
to set up. The facial expressions on the people in the paintings
all seemed to respond to the photographs. Some were humorous,
some poignant, some sensuous. One older woman sits with her
hands clasped in her lap, a befuddled look on her face. Next to
that is a close up of a woman's hand on her clit, next to that
is a still-life with a large fish. Some of the women are quite
beautiful, seductive. Two young girls, princesses, sit close
together with knowing looks on their faces. An older woman looks
wistful. One looks stern. For me, the primary visual
relationships are between the women. As they look across the
rooms at each other and at the visitor in the presence of the
photographs. The women and their sex. It's what was missing in
the paintings.
Cottingham: Perhaps your photographs deliver the explicit
pornography that the paintings only imply. In that sense they
collaborate, rather than war, with the traditional
objectification of women that takes place in the paintings.
Leonard: Those paintings were all painted by men, and largely
for men. There's no getting around that. But I'm looking at
them. I think the installation underlines what's there, in the
paintings, and also what's not in the paintings what's
missing. I was aware of the omnipresent male gaze, and I do
think that the piece addresses that, but what's far more
interesting to me are the thoughts I had about these women. That
two hundred years ago these women had sex, they had desire, they
jerked off, some were lesbians. Some were probably miserable and
repressed, but also some may have found great joy and power in
their sexuality. Look, I `m not anti-porn. I think imaging sex

is good. It's fun, it's sexy. And sex is for pleasure. The
problems are with who makes porn, who profits from it. And who
it's for. The problem is that women aren't treated as equals,
and women are hated so much and abused so much. It's not a
photograph of a pussy that's the problem here. I'm not
interested in remaining trapped forever in a critique of the
male gaze. I have my own gaze to think about.
Cottingham: One of the things that becomes complicated in the
representation of female genitals is that a long history of
representation within the "pornographic" arena precedes any
contemporary attempt to re-situate the iconography: the
production and distribution of pornography are what define it.
It's not as if this image of female genitals has never been
seen. It's been reproduced in painting, usually for private
commissions that's the history behind the famous Courbet
painting. Representations of female genitals, in painting and
then in photography too, were made explicitly to be sold to men
so that men could do in private what they couldn't literally do
in the museums: jerk off. I think it's also important to
remember that sexuality is not now nor has it ever been a "free
space": all sexual practices are circumscribed by other
political and economic determinants. Representations of female
genitals are not only for "sexual use" i.e., as a catalyst to
orgasm for the viewer. They also function on other non-orgasmic
levels, such as designating (and "proving") female difference or
as "evidence" of female "lack." So I don't know if the only way
that your installation reads is in terms of the kind of
intertextuality between the photos and the paintings that you're
describing. You're also stuck with what can't be eliminated: the
male voyeurism remains, both in relationship to your images and
also to the eighteenth-century paintings of clothed but still
female-coded images. Because the female has been constructed as
the sign of sex, as the sign of sexual object, the image of the
female still reads that way to us. Did that present a conflict
for you; was it involved in your considerations?
Leonard: I can't control male voyeurism. All I can do is point
it out. I had to just count on my own instincts. Sure, I was
scared, and I felt a bit defensive, a little bit embarrassed at
times during the installation. I thought it was a risk worth
taking. Another thing I wanted to try was to take pictures of
women's genitals in a different way than how I had seen them
pictured. In most art, the women's genitals are invisible, a
discreet curve or hairless mound. Or in most straight porn,
shaven into a tiny triangle, pink, shiny and neat. I wanted to
photograph pussy in a way that looked real to me way, each one

different.

Text: Copyright, Journal of Contemporary Art, Inc. and the

authors.