Zoe Leonard. Analogue.

Starting from her own street

In the late 1990s, Zoe Leonard began photographing the neighbourhood where she lived: the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She shot shopfronts, signs, windows, small details on the pavement. Groceries, secondhand stores, photo shops.

These were family businesses, each with one owner and its own way of arranging things. And they were disappearing. Rents rose. The neighbourhood was remade. Chain stores took over corner after corner. Leonard photographed them while they were still open, when their closing could already be foreseen.

The project ran from 1998 to 2009. For more than a decade she returned to those streets, sometimes finding a shop still there, sometimes finding its sign taken down.

An old camera for old things

Leonard used a Rolleiflex from the 1940s, a tool she described as left over from the mechanical age. That is not a trivial technical note. Shops being left behind were recorded by a camera that was itself being left behind.

The Rolleiflex gives a square frame. The prints were made two ways: gelatin silver for black and white, chromogenic prints for colour, each about 28 by 28 centimetres. Nothing glossy, nothing retouched. They look like documents, and they are documents.

What they show is ordinary. Faded signs. Handwritten price tags. Mannequins. The inside of a small, crowded shop. That ordinariness is exactly what was being lost: the character of each shop, the diversity of a small economy, the history of a street.

Following the bales

Then Leonard went further. She followed the path of used goods: secondhand clothing, discarded advertising, Kodak photo shops of a fading technology. They led her to markets in Africa, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Mexico and the Middle East.

One recurring image is the bale of used clothes, tightly bound, shipped from one place to another. It appears in New York, then again on a hand painted sign for a secondhand clothing importer in Kampala, Uganda. Then, in the markets of Kampala, used shirts hang carefully, shaded from the sun, displayed as if in a shop window.

So Analogue is not only about one neighbourhood. It maps a network. What is thrown away in one place becomes merchandise in another. Globalisation appears through very concrete things.

412 photographs, 25 chapters

The full Analogue consists of 412 photographs in 25 chapters, hung in grids or long sequences. It premiered in 2007, at the Wexner Center for the Arts and at documenta 12. It has since existed in other forms too: a set of 40 dye transfer prints, a book, a complete room installation. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has shown it.

Standing before the whole wall, the viewer stops seeing single shops. They see repetition. This shop, that shop, this city, that city, the same kind of closing. The scale of the change only appears when the pictures stand together.

Analogue is both document and quiet elegy. It records an everyday life that is fading, and questions the systems that make it fade. It asks us to look slowly: what survives, what has been replaced, and what it means to remember through images.