MoMA: Zoe Leonard: Analogue
June 25–August 30, 2015
Zoe Leonard: Chapter 17 from Analogue. 1998–2009. Twelve chromogenic color prints from 412 prints, each 11 x 11″ (27.9 x 27.9 cm). © 2015 Zoe Leonard
Analogue, by Zoe Leonard (American, b. 1961), is a landmark project comprising 412 photographs conceived over the course of a decade. Displayed in serial grids and organized into 25 chapters, Analogue documents the eclipsed texture of 20th-century urban life as seen in vanishing mom-and-pop stores and the simultaneous emergence of the global rag trade. Leonard took her own New York neighborhood, Manhattan’s Lower East Side, as a point of departure in the late 1990s. She then followed the circulation of recycled merchandise—used clothing, discarded advertisements, and the old technology of Kodak camera shops—to far-flung markets in Africa, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Mexico, and the Middle East.
