staff

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/curse-contemporary/"></div>A photograph by British artist Josephine Pryde accompanies Natasha Stagg’s new collection of essays, Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019, out now from Semiotext(e). It depicts a woman (presumably) holding a cigarette between lilac-manicured fingers. The cigarette is right at the end of its life, ash scattered on what looks like an iPad screen — a black mirrored surface collecting dregs that resemble cocaine.
The woman wears a shirt that reads “Sorry” with a slash through it, alluding to the Millennial adage: “Sorry Not Sorry.” The phrase usually takes the form of a hashtag or as an addendum to a statement that has been said with some known risk. It is what one says to their “haters” as a response to criticism. It’s a double negative, a self-cancellation, apparent in the syntax itself. I could apologize, but I won’t. It reveals one’s indifference or disinterest in giving what is expected or perhaps warranted. Rather, it suggests an indulgence and asserts some merit in being “unapologetic” about one’s actions, desires, or opinions. It expresses a distinct individualist mentality, protection of oneself from criticism of something that she knows may be perceived as wrong (evident in the impulse to apologize in the first place).
The image of the woman projecting this statement while ashing onto her device is a perfect representation of the type of Millennial woman whom Stagg profiles throughout this collection of essays, never exempting herself from being one of them. This woman does things with a shrug while collecting ashy remains on the surface of her phone screen.
With her deadpan wit and the aloofness of her voice, Natasha Stagg is our most trusted reporter on this era. Like the Beat poets and Joan Didion, Stagg has a keen eye on her contemporaries, approaching them with skepticism but still wanting to be invited to the party and take part in the perks (after all, one must go out at night in order to see what’s going on). Stagg mimics the general apathy of late capitalism, simultaneously aligning herself with her peers and distancing herself from them, at least for the sake of reportage.
In the essay “Confidence,” Stagg profiles model and influencer Alexandra Marzella, who identifies herself as an artist — a catchall term she uses to characterize her practice as a social media user with a significant following, a model, and a sex worker. It’s unclear if Stagg considers this woman an artist too, but she seems to shrug when the influencer suggests that she is. Sure, Stagg’s tone implies. Might as well be. As any good journalist, Stagg doesn’t set herself up as a judge. And as a good Millennial — over-stimulated and fatigued — she knows her own judgment doesn’t really matter. “Not that I’m judging,” she writes. And she’s not. Rather she quietly nudges the reader, asking her to evaluate what she has rendered in black and white. While many of her takes are critical of contemporary culture they are also somewhat resigned to the fact of ever-expanding late capitalism and the inevitable confrontation with its colonization of all aspects of a life.
With essays on the branding ethos of Abercrombie &amp; Fitch, the Kardashians, EDM festivals, and #MeToo, the book documents encounters with pop culture and fashion that are the 21st-century equivalent to Didion’s observations of the culture wars in the summer of 1969. But Stagg’s five year-old on acid comes in the form of an artificial intelligence Instagram influencer with brand sponsorships.
In many of her essays, Stagg returns to contemporary culture’s unique obsession with mediocrity — anything requiring too much effort, effort that we don’t have the time or attention span to give, becomes unattractive. The anticipation and representation of something is more appealing than the thing itself. Anything that exists in a sort of mid-level range, that’s knocked-off or franchised, Stagg observes becoming the thing at the center of culture, except there is no center or top, only a shiny flat surface.
In “The Drop,” about EDM rave culture, she writes:
<blockquote>I found myself lost in the hedonistic energy of the crowd that — ill-intentioned or not — simply wanted to get away for the last few days of summer in a sky of confetti slowly falling through beams of white light. For the fourth or fifth time, I heard one of Zedd’s hits, even if he wasn’t there: &#8220;If our love is tragedy, why are you my remedy?&#8221; and finally felt the meaning: How can something this positive in essence end up so heartbreaking? A sea of hands reached up, and found no tangible answer, only another anticipated drop.</blockquote>
The anticipated drop is the thing that thrills. The feeling of anticipation is more satisfying than the proceeding event. With such oversaturation one begins to crave something bland: a mid-level influencer who lives in the Midwest, shops at the mall, and doesn’t take too many fashion risks is more appealing than the mega-celebrity whose life is bizarre and unattainable. Real people lacking a particular talent are more relatable than those possessing one, and those who are neither real nor talented are just as good (see: <a href="https://www.instagram.com/lilmiquela/?hl=en">Lil Miquela</a>).
Stagg suggests the same idea in an essay about the Kardashians called “Right Place.” She writes, “Kim is every race and no race, smoothed and bronzed and contoured beyond natural indicators… they [the Kardashians] get treatments in order to appear prettier for the very same audience watching them get work done. Treatments are more closely documented than the results.” Smoothed and flattened is best. The results become irrelevant but the existence in a limbo is pleasurable. The initial goal forgotten, there is no goal anymore, just a simulation of one. The mechanisms at work behind celebrity have become transparent there is no longer a need to conceal one’s desire fame, sometimes it’s seen as brave to sell out. She writes of Kim, “Maybe she’s not the void at all, but a surplus of the behaviors we were once told to suppress, like mixing business with pleasure.”
Writing from within the world of fashion PR and brand consulting, Stagg is a kind of double agent. She is a voyeur of her friends and her enemies and herself. In her choice of subject and genre, she emulates the trend cycle she observes. Many of the pieces are reprinted from the past eight years, about fads that never really picked up or a celebrity’s Instagram account that is now deleted. To write about things so contemporary and recent in cultural memory, Stagg risks not being taken seriously, dealing with subjects that have not yet been inducted into a cultural canon or deemed worthy of study. At the same time this renders her relatively incapable of trite nostalgia and places her on the cutting edge. And I happen to believe that the best assessments of culture tend to come from a reserved cool girl who is not jaded but just a little bored. The cynicism is there just enough; you don’t feel excluded, but you want to know what she knows that you don’t. This has become something of a brand itself (I follow her on Instagram).
Stagg offers no antidote. There’s no solution or call to action proposed, just an account of demise and a list of fears. She puts it bluntly when she writes, “My fear was that guilt would destroy the classics and there&#8217;d be no one left to fuck. All movies would be as low-budget and as puritanical as the stuff they play on Lifetime, all of New York would look like a Target ad, every book or article would be a cathartic tell-all, and I&#8217;d be sexually frustrated but too ashamed to hook up with assholes, or even to watch porn.” When I live in this Target ad, as I witness the further personification of corporations via sexy avatars of social media — and then the conflation of this with art — I know I’ll want to commiserate with Stagg. And maybe have a cigarette. Sorry Not Sorry.
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Curse of the Contemporary

e40e4927-5a95-4b68-918a-a6f83f9e3f34-sized-1000x1000

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/judging-cover-grace-hadland-reviews-booksmart/"></div>I almost left the theater halfway through Booksmart but stayed for the lesbian scene I knew was coming. I was pleased to see the love interest sporting white Chuck Taylors (a high school gay classic), and the ritual untying of those shoes while getting it on: the costume designer seems to have googled “lesbian fashion.” The character of Hope (Diana Silvers) resembles the love child of David Crosby and Milla Jochavich’s character in Dazed and Confused, sporting the Chucks with a suede fringe jacket (high school movies can’t seem to resist a little bite out of Linklater’s classic). Hope teases her classmate Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) until Amy fights back with a surprising kiss (her first). Hope laughs and smirks, then kisses back. This clunky, sweet, sexy encounter is perhaps the film’s only moment of authenticity. All others had me cringing.
This new high school flick from actress-as-director Olivia Wilde attempts to subvert the clichéd night-before-graduation-narrative, but falls limply back into what it had aimed to avoid. The main characters, Amy and Molly (Beanie Feldstein), are studious seniors who, filled with regret the night before graduation after finding out that even the kids who spent their teen years partying were also admitted to prestigious universities, decide to let their hair down for a first and last hurrah. Molly is comically horrified when the stoner who was held back a few grades reveals that even he got a job at Google. Humbled, Molly gets a lesson in “don’t judge a book by its cover,” which becomes the overarching ethos of the movie (another trip into cliché). Later reveals in this vein include: the principal moonlighting as an Uber driver (why would a public school principal need a second job, right?); the mean hot girl known for giving road head actually just enjoys blow jobs; the rich jock is actually down to earth (he just wants friends); the skater dyke is in fact, heterosexual. Aside from the few instances of genuine adolescent naivety found in the actors&#8217; desire to amuse, it’s all boilerplate redemption narrative.
Everyone in Booksmart is trying to be “good.” The characters face hardly any conflict; the film teases the possibility of such and swiftly pulls back. No one is called any cruel names. No one faces a difficult situation. Amy’s evangelical parents in fact, seem overly supportive of her homosexuality. In this fictive high school the meanest thought is that these quirky nerds are too smart, too successful for their own good.  What they are all so smart about is … never explicated. Not only is the screenwriting full of holes and depth, but it’s representative of an insidious trend in contemporary culture in which politics dominate the space of art — correctness being more important than moral ambiguity, nuance, messiness. Tidiness becomes paramount.
The “utopia” of Booksmart is boring, unsexy, and ultimately hypocritical in how it centers on the very things that are actual sources of oppression: the government institutions both girls aspire to work in, the elitist educational institutions and corporations that determine the students’ notion of “success” in life. The film clips along without any criticism of such institutions — and, for that matter, no criticism of anything at all (not one mention of class).
Of course, it would be disingenuous if a teen comedy addressed its own capitalist propaganda, since progressive ideals and Hollywood blockbusters are ultimately incompatible. Being so saturated with “wokeness,” the ideals “female-fronted” films like Booksmart claim to promote are rendered hollow, no more than thinly veiled corporate marketing strategies. The PC song and dance is just gratuitous enough that you might not catch the big business product placement sprinkled throughout the film. “Let’s call a Lyft” is a common refrain; “iPad” and “Google” are in there a number of times too. Woke buzzwords are peppered throughout in a similar fashion. As if a bleep machine is being operated like on cable, “hooker” becomes “sex worker”; “butch” becomes “masculine gender expression.” In these moments the characters so clearly become a conduit for the woke screenwriter: a white liberal Baby Boomer trying to save her career and impress her daughter.
With all the focus on representation, movie-goers are distracted by who is being seen rather than who is being heard, and, perhaps more insidiously, who is profiting. It’s not that I expected much more from this movie: it’s the unsurprising product of a capitalist industry feeding off whatever palatable trend they can get their hands on — right now, it happens to be feminism and identity politics. It’s that I don’t appreciate being pandered to and I’d like to think the movie-going masses are smart. But they keep us dumb so we pay our $17 and forget about this movie so we’ll go to the next one that’s just the same.
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Judging by Cover: Grace Hadland Reviews Booksmart

Judging by Cover: Grace Hadland Reviews Booksmart

emily

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/narrative-spinning-wild-nights/"></div>I saw Wild Nights with Emily alone on a Sunday night — a kind of ritual in my life for that night of the week. I head to the movies right around the time I start to get nervous, at 5:30 or 6, about dying, never being loved, impending doom, and so on. Movie outings get me out of that funk, and sometimes takes me above and beyond. This one certainly did. I wrote in an email to a friend after I saw it: “i am so moved by History ha ha. i guess more so i&#8217;m moved by disruptions of history; i guess more so im moved by truth and lesbians.”
The central themes of Madeleine Olnek’s newest film are just that: disruptions and truth and lesbians. It is a retelling of the life and career of Emily Dickinson (played by Molly Shannon) focusing on her life-long relationship with her sister in-law, lover, and muse, Susan Dickinson (Susan Ziegler). Olnek pulls back the curtain to reveal the mechanics and conventions of history at work, bringing to the surface details of Dickinson’s biography that have been often, probably deliberately, omitted.
As the film tells, Susan Dickinson capitalized on the union of matrimony by marrying Emily’s brother so that the two could live next to each other and no one would be suspicious of their close friendship and rather, charmed by their sisterly affection. The cinematic depiction of the relationship between the two women is based upon a collection of letters and poems Emily sent to Susan over her lifetime. The film was extensively researched, using the Dickinson archives at Harvard and Amherst that house her library and papers.
The film is laced with wit and dark humor. It debunks old wives’ tales about Dickinson while entertaining the small possibility of their truth. Who we thought we knew as a reclusive spinster working from divine genius we come to know as a lesbian intellectual. Of her choice for the leading role, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdi5nE2RrUw">Olnek says</a>, “I felt if Molly Shannon played Emily Dickinson people would finally understand who she was.” And Olnek’s choice worked to great effect. Shannon’s appeal and familiarity successfully advance this “new” version of Dickinson as a likeable, nuanced figure.
Mabel Todd (Amy Seimetz), an eager and self-absorbed young woman, based on a real figure, becomes the publisher of her work and the producer of her “brand” after Dickinson’s death. Todd “discovers” her poems, swiftly spinning a narrative in which Emily is a modest and depressed woman who never wanted her poems published, rather than a working lesbian poet who was subjected to misogynistic prejudice by those with the power to publish her work.
Olnek gets at the dark absurdity of misogyny: how bizarre, how preposterous it is, but simultaneously, the ludicrousness of posthumous idolatry. In her depiction of Mabel Todd, whose intentions may seem benign, Olnek exposes her to be destructive and driven by self-interest. The film critiques a contemporary trend in the art and film world: the exhuming of careers, the cleansing of histories, and the simplification of narratives in which She is always the underdog who becomes the hero.
When a publisher, Higginson, condescendingly poses the question “What is Poetry?” Emily promptly replies with a list of the things that are poetry, including something along the lines of: “When the top of my head gets cut off and everything pours out, I know that is poetry.” A comedic yet poignant moment, in which Higginson’s ignorance is revealed and Dickinson asserts her wit. The question is only rhetorical because he does not in fact have any ideas about what poetry could be. But Emily does. He leaves their meeting, rejecting her request to be published in his paper.
This film also challenges the tired and lazy “powder-puff” reboot trend in which previously male-centric blockbusters are “reimagined” (with little to no imagination,  mind you) starring all-female casts, brazenly exploiting contemporary concerns with representation and identity politics. The motto being: Slap a pair of tits on Captain Marvel and you’ve got a feminist hit! Wild Nights refuses to indulge in that kind of pathetic navel-gazing remake and does just what those films fail to do: wrestle with the ambiguous histories of women and queer people and explore the malleability that that ambiguity affords.
As I see it, Wild Nights introduces a new genre — a kind of mock period piece biopic with a lesbian feminist bent. The film pokes fun at the often bland or unimaginative attempts to represent an era with historic authenticity: the wigs and costumes and strict adherence to antiquated language. In the style of Miloš Forman’s Amadeus and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, both films that incorporate contemporary colloquialisms and aesthetics, Wild Nights expands the possibilities of the historic biopic. The art direction features obviously hokey props (plastic flowers, fake cats) and cheap looking costumes and set pieces, almost breaking the fourth wall, reminding the audience of the dramatic conventions that these films often follow. With this playfulness, the film critiques the obsession to (re)construct biographies of cultural icons, to make their lives out to be more significant than their work. The film observes our compulsion to sensationalize — to ascribe our icons our own desires and to simplify them in order to understand and explain the existence of their work. Of course, while these reconstructed biographies might entertain us, they ultimately detract from the truth, performing a kind of erasure. In the striking final sequence, the screen is split in two: one shot shows Susan tenderly washing Emily’s corpse; the other, Mabel erasing Susan’s name from Emily’s poems and letters. Olnek revels in the irony, the discrepancy between what we want to believe happened and what probably really happened.
When the movie let out I went to the bookstore next door in search of the book of letters between Emily and Susan. I wasn&#8217;t in the mood to look very hard, so instead I bought a copy of Not Me by Eileen Myles, the first book of theirs I encountered in college. To me Myles is essentially a cultural descendant of Dickinson, another Yankee lesbian poet, and the first I fell in love with.
<blockquote>I hopped 
on an Amtrak to New 
York in the early 
‘70s and I guess 
you could say 
my hidden years 
began. I thought 
Well I’ll be a poet. 
What could be more 
foolish and obscure. 
I became a lesbian. 
Every woman in my 
family looks like 
a dyke but it’s really 
stepping off the flag 
when you become one. 
While holding this ignominious 
pose I have seen and 
I have learned and 
I am beginning to think 
there is no escaping 
history… 
(An American Poem)</blockquote>
I didn&#8217;t have a copy of my own. I had always used my ex-girlfriend’s, which made the purchase just as appropriate as the Dickinson letters, I thought. I probably shouldn’t have bought anything that night, spared my checking account the hit. But it was 5:30 and I needed poetry. I needed to be taken out of my own thoughts, to indulge the possibilities of an alternative history: that our beautiful, melancholic poet-ess laureate was just a cranky dyke.
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Narrative Spinning on Wild Nights

Narrative Spinning on Wild Nights

favourite-blog-image

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/undeserving-favourite/"></div>In the final shot of Yorgos Lanthimos’s film The Favourite, Emma Stone and Olivia Colman’s faces are superimposed, slowly fading over one another. Abigail (Emma Stone), the innocent-turned-malicious ingénue, has her fingers lazily, apathetically inside the Queen Anne (Olivia Colman). Colman’s expression of weary ecstasy matches Stone’s of boredom — perhaps even of shame. The image of the two women’s faces superimposed is familiar, calling to mind mawkish movie posters and romance paperbacks that might feature a ménage-à-trois. These final frames suggest that two women are becoming one, mirroring one another, or merging personalities. The superimposition begins to conflate the identities of the Queen and Abigail, and indicates Abigail’s assumption of her cousin Sarah Churchill’s (Rachel Weisz) role as the Queen’s (quite literally) right-hand man. With this culminating scene, as with the entirety of the film, Lanthimos wades into precarious territory, in terms of what is being suggested about queerness between women, ending up with a rote depiction of women that is not initially apparent, obscured by the pleasing visuals. 
The Favourite focuses on a strained, quasi-Sapphic dynamic between Abigail, Sarah, and Queen Anne, each based on a historical figure. Queen Anne is daft and pathetic, bloated with power but without desire to do anything with it, making her an easy target for her power-hungry ladies in waiting. Sarah acts as the Queen’s primary aide, waiting on her hand and foot. Because of the Queen’s various bodily afflictions, she is often bedridden, leaving Sarah to act as her political mastermind. Anne is almost wholly removed from the political life of her country; Sarah has to remind her: “We are still at war.” “Oh. I did not know that,” the Queen replies. Then there’s Abigail, Sarah’s cousin from the country who has come to seek work in the court. The conflict between the three begins when seemingly-naïve Abigail slowly reveals herself to be megalomanical. Once Abigail figures out that it is sexual favors that keep her cousin in the Queen’s confidence, she makes her way into the royal bedchamber, eventually taking over her cousin’s role in court — and by proxy, the Queen’s. 
This is a familiar “love triangle,” one that, rather than surrounding love or desire, surrounds power, fame, money, beauty — things that the women want to obtain rather than one another. We’ve seen countless women on screen use their youth and sexuality to steal power from other women, from All About Eve (1950) to Persona (1966) to Black Swan (2010) and even in last year’s Suspiria. This type of conflict between women is nothing revolutionary. 
The lazy portrayal of women having sex with women as seeing themselves in one another — thus engaging in an ultimate act of narcissism — reveals the insidious misogyny that permeates stories about queer characters. Lesbianism has often been pathologized, used to suggest a woman’s psychological decline — that any woman who has sex with another woman must have fully lost her mind. Take Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), in which two women — a nurse and her patient who has just suffered a psychological break, causing her to be unable to speak  — experience a strange convergence of selves. There are suggestions of sex, but they are never explicit, and never about desire. At the climax of the film’s psychological drama, the two women’s faces are merged together, as the two frames of film meld. Lanthimos’s final image of Colman and Stone’s faces borrows from Bergman’s iconic shot, implying similarly that sex between women disconnects them from themselves rather than connecting them to one another beyond the idea of mirroring or merging. 
Queer desire is too heavy a subject for Lanthimos to take on in this film, so it is avoided altogether. The queer sex is solely transactional, another responsibility of the lady in waiting, “to rub the leg” of the queen in exchange for a boost of power. It’s true that sex can be about such things — power, exchange, narcissism — but as I watched the film I wondered: why can’t it be about desire? And if it wasn’t going to be even slightly about queer desire, then what is the reason for the characters’ queerness in the first place? 
In a <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/center-court/">recent essay about the film featured in LARB</a>, David Marno writes, “It focuses on a love and power triangle involving three women, and passes the Bechdel test with flying color — here it is men who spend most of their on-screen time talking about women in power, often while touching themselves or stroking penile objects that range from a walking stick to a goose’s neck.” Though the male characters are peripheral, and somewhat ridiculous, this movie still suffers from and appeals to the oppressive, ever-lingering male — or perhaps just generally heterosexual — gaze. But not the old gaze of the man who gets off watching two straight actresses touch tongue, but the gaze of the woke man, congratulating himself on enjoying a movie with three female leads where male characters occupy the sidelines for once. 
Lanthimos is kidding himself if he expects credit for injecting some queerness into mainstream film. He merely dresses up a familiar narrative in a queer guise with Emma Stone, America’s incredibly bland, incredibly straight sweetheart, at the center. Queerness in The Favourite becomes an afterthought, and at times nearly the butt of the joke. Sex is more a mode of women connecting themselves to power rather than to one another. That old chestnut? What seems to be Lanthimos’s attempt to create complex female characters falls short — rather we have three lazily-constructed stereotypes, nothing more than a depiction of women we have seen many times over — using sex in exchange for power. Had there been some queering, authentic queering, of this narrative, perhaps we would have a film worthy of the praise that this one has been receiving.
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The Undeserving Favourite

zoeleonard

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/zoe-leonards-photographic-elegies/"></div>The current exhibition of Zoe Leonard’s work at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA borrows its title from the collection’s centerpiece, a work called Survey. The eponymous work, produced between 2009 and 2012, is made up of 6,266 postcards of Niagara Falls collected by the artist. The postcards are arranged in stacks, with each stack composed of different cards showing the same vantage point. The stacks are arranged in correlation to their location along the falls. The work is a kind of sculpture, but also feels personal. You might be tempted to pluck a card from one of the stacks and mail it to your grandmother. In this way, Leonard does not resist the postcard’s inherent vernacularity. The cards are not purely formal objects; they insist on the casual intimacy between sender and receiver. This is Leonard’s specialty — to show the ways we use photography to commemorate, to tell stories, to understand our world.
 The exhibition’s title suggests an introduction. Indeed, this show is one of the first major exhibitions of Leonard’s work in an American museum other than a retrospective of her work exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art earlier this year. Though Leonard is American herself, one reason for this recent embrace by American institutions might be the renewed circulation of her poetic text piece “I want a dyke for president,” which resurfaced on the internet in the wake of the 2016 election. The piece owed its viral success to how tragically foretelling it is. In it, Leonard writes, “I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown. Always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker. Always a liar, always a thief, and never caught.” Though the MOCA exhibition shows less of this explicitly political work (Leonard has made a number of works about the AIDS crisis and queer politics generally), Leonard’s social and political leanings come out in this exhibition in other ways as she documents her own life and history as a queer person.
It becomes increasingly apparent in the exhibition that Leonard is some kind of pack rat. The show begins with a work called 1961, a collection of blue suitcases she has accumulated, one for each year of her life. And yet, Leonard’s hoarding is neither chaotic nor arbitrary. Rather, she is very organized, methodical, and saves only what is important. The problem, or the explanation, is that so many things happen to be important. In an untitled series of black and white photos taken from the window of an airplane, each image shows clouds from a different perspective, each completely different from the last. The series relies on its collectiveness — just one image would not have the same effect. Leonard constantly returns to the process of accumulation. She wrangles with the complexities of photography, and the feebleness of our desire to freeze and preserve a moment or a form. Her works explore this aspect of the medium subtly, beautifully, but never sentimentally. Her photo collections convey a kind of melancholy, which she exposes as a residual quality of photography. Each photograph aches, suggesting loss — whatever is in the picture has now changed. The clouds change, the graffiti has been painted over, the trees have grown and died. This causes existential angst for viewers, too, because we understand that our lives and bodies are also in constant flux. The power of Leonard’s work is that she makes this existential point but does not dwell on it; she moves through it. She does not move toward anything in particular, but rather, moves to move, in much the same pattern as the subjects of her works.
Leonard follows the rules of photography while also making new ones. Or perhaps she just questions the old ones. Another work — a collection entitled How to Make Good Pictures — is composed of 429 books of Kodak’s photography manual of the same name. The Kodak manual is presumably not for professional artists, but for consumers who have just purchased a Kodak camera. Leonard’s work organizes each edition of the book into stacks, in a parallel presentation to the postcards in Survey. How does one make a good picture? Does this book really have the answer? Leonard’s work refrains from overtly mocking the book, but nonetheless observes the pedagogy of making good pictures or good art with a skeptical eye. In her other works, Leonard doesn’t take photos of her own, but instead photographs found images — collections of family photos or portraits. She always shifts her role between observer, viewer, and maker. Another project in which she questions not just the conventions of photography but of history itself is called the Fae Richards Archive, which she produced in collaboration with filmmaker Cheryl Dunye for the film The Watermelon Woman. The project is a series of staged photos of a fictional character, Fae Richards, an African-American actress born in the early 20th century. The project documents the span of Richards’s fictionalized life as it is portrayed in Dunye’s film. Originally made as a prop for the film, Leonard’s photo project now stands on its own as a unique work. It interrogates the ways we document and create our own history, and the ways we might recreate or alter our history with photography. The photos look convincingly aged, as if authentic photos from Richards’s lifetime. In fact, an uninformed viewer might believe Fae Richards is a real person, a thought both Leonard and Dunye seem satisfied to provoke.
Survey captures Leonard’s unique point of view and her persistent probing of the art of photography. As an artist, Leonard is quiet: she merely guides you, pointing things out, drawing your attention to the deep cracks in the pavement. She indulges in our discomfort with the innate tragedy of impermanence and the desire to counter this with a camera.
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Zoe Leonard’s Photographic Elegies

Love Me Tender

Gracie Hadland is a writer living in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/disgraciee?lang=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">@disgraciee</a>.

Gracie Hadland

Absolute Sovereignty: On Constance Debré’s “Love Me Tender”

"Writing only leads to more writing." — Colette

Literary Criticism

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

Note(s): Work(ing) Process(es) Re: Concerns (That Take On / Deal With)

The Melancholy of Embodiment: Dara Birnbaum’s Mass Media Investigations

"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it." — Frank Zappa

Art &amp; Architecture

Marion Stokes and the Power of Guerrilla Archiving

"Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television." —Woody Allen

Television

"There is only one thing that can kill the Movies, and that is education." — Will Rogers

Film

Being a Person as an Image: A Conversation with Christina Catherine Martinez

Trying to Build the World from Ash: Chris Rush on the Art of Memoir

Gracie Hadland is a writer living in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/disgraciee?lang=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">@disgraciee</a>.