A conversation between Zoe Leonard and Kate Abrams

It interrupted the entrance into the room and created an obstruction between the viewer and the view. You could see the view beyond the sculpture, but it forced a shift in focus back and forth between the inside and outside, the museum and the city, the past and the present. You had to think about multiple things at once; instead of being able to gaze passively at the view, you’re being asked to think about that in a more complicated way. To think about how views and viewpoints are constructed, and that photography is the frame through which many of us see and understand the world. The sculpture follows the life of this publication in print; the stacks are arranged chronologically starting with the first edition in the early 20th century until it went out of print in the mid 90s. This tracks a history of amateur photography and the family snapshot in America.

KA: I like what you said about trying to get the viewer to think about more than one thing at a time, to bring different concerns into the room. It reminds me of something you’ve said a lot about the retrospective, which is the idea of the exhibition as an artwork or artistic process in and of itself. In a way, it seems that the book stack specifically anchors that concern of exhibition making as art making. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

ZL: I wanted to work against some of the conventions related to retrospective exhibitions. There is an expectation that a retrospective will provide the definitive narrative of an artist’s work, and that it will stabilize the meaning and significance of the work. Retrospective exhibitions, by definition, place the work in the past. I wanted to treat the show as an experiment. I wanted it to feel alive, rather than trying to show everything I’ve ever made. I wanted to create a dynamic conversation with the viewer in the here and now. So making a new work and placing it in a central position was exciting. It brought the show into the present, and at the same time, I think it brought some of the early work into focus. A lot of my work has attempted to fuse photography and architecture, or to explore the potential for photography as a three-dimensional form. This large book stack—a three-dimensional object that examines almost 100 years of photography—encapsulates that interest.

In museums now, people walk around with their cell phones and take pictures of everything. Often when visitors at the Whitney get to that big window, they take out their camera, take a picture, take a selfie. Photography has become integrated into our everyday lives. I’m not only talking about photography as a fine art form, but as a vernacular one. So many of us have phones with cameras in our pockets. We use them all the time. We use snapshots as a medium of communication and a form of self-expression. Of course the Internet and digital technology have taken this to a new level, but people have been taking snapshots since the early days of photography. So I’m interested both in this human impulse and in the ways in which the practice has been commercialized and codified. ‘How to Take Good Pictures’ was first published around 1911 as a guide to amateur photography, and the covers evolve and change over the years. The graphic design changes, the title changes, the pictures are replaced and updated, but remain similar throughout: happy families, smiling children, pets and vacations, boats. These are aspirational images. The subjects all seem to be white and middle class, portrayed in moments of leisure. So it struck me that this book is not just a technical guide, it’s also a social guide, giving direction on what we should photograph, and by extension, what our lives should look like. Just like with social media, the images are idealized and there are unspoken rules about what to share and not to share. Taking snapshots is personal and it’s emotional, but it also has to do with politics and social codes. It has to do with class. It has to do with accessibility. It has to do with ideas about race and gender, about belonging. It’s an intensely socio-political mode of interaction.

KA: You basically just led right into one of my other observations, which is about the shift of the verb in the manual from ‘make’ to ‘take.’ That happens around 1981 and it really signals the shift from the notion of ‘creating’ a picture to ‘capturing’ one, or from the subjective to the objective. How, as you said, photography has become a vernacular practice. In this way, I see the work and especially the way that you designed the exhibition as a window into your entire practice—fighting not necessarily to preserve the analog but to reinforce the artist’s and the viewer’s agency in an increasingly digital, and objectified world.

ZL: Yes, that’s really something isn’t it? That the title of the book changes. It was actually that one word shift in the title—‘make’ to ‘take’—that made me really want to make this piece. I had been playing around with this book in my studio for several years, but that language shift gave me the idea for how to structure this as a work, to organize it chronologically, as a linear, serial history of the publication. There were other language shifts in the subtitle; at one point, it’s called ‘a book for the amateur photographer’ then it’s ‘a handbook for the everyday photographer.’ The language around amateur photography is developing and changing. But that particular shift seemed significant to me. To ‘make’ something is to create it. It indicates care and labor. It means that you are actively taking the time to construct something. To ‘take’ something is almost the exact opposite implication. You consume it, you absorb it. You’re not working for it in the same way. In this trajectory, the concept of photography changes from being an activity that contributes to the world into something one consumes. Embedded in this modest photography manual, there’s actually a lot of information about the role that photography plays in the social and political aspect of daily life.

KA: One that’s not printed… the book went out of print in the 90s, but there are still so many things that are guid-ing you toward creating a certain identity online.

ZL: Exactly. I install the sculpture with one end placed up against a wall and it extends out into the room. I think it’s about 35 feet long. I install it so there’s a lot of room to move around it on three sides. So, the work has a beginning, a starting point, which is the first edition. Each stack of books is another printing or edition, and the stacks are arranged in chronological order going out into the room. The sculpture ends because the book goes out of print. I assume the book went out of print because of the prevalence of digital photography, so for me in a way the negative space represents the time when digital photography takes over. That open space beyond the last stack is an implication that the activity of snapshot photography continues, and is still happening now. It’s just happen-ing in a different way, one that we don’t quite understand yet, because we are still in it.

KA: I’ve been thinking more about the formal aspects of the work, the linear nature of the sculpture itself and how that relates in so many obvious and not-so-obvious ways to the history of sculpture. I don’t think I’ve ever actually asked you this question: when was your first encounter with making sculpture? I think from knowing your work I could probably piece it together, but I wanted to hear that from you.

ZL: That’s a great question. Actually, I think I’ve been making sculpture all along. Even with my really early photographic work, I was always thinking of photographs as objects, as works on paper that had weight and curl and body. I was thinking about scale. I was thinking about architecture. Even in my earliest installations, in the late 80s and early 90s, I really thought about the whole space as an active environment. The first sculpture I showed publicly was Strange Fruit, which I made over the course of about five or six years in the mid 90s. I showed it a few different ways, as a work in progress over the course of several years, until I formalized it as one large work, installed on the floor, and gave it the title Strange Fruit. I haven’t made a lot of sculptures, but it is a significant aspect of my work, and I think there’s a lot of interplay between the questions I’m asking with photography and with the three-dimensional work. This was especially true in the retrospective, but also with the camera obscura pieces and the postcard works. In the Wake—that first show at Hauser & Wirth—was the first time I showed book stacks alongside photographs. Although they were independent works, there was a dialogue between them and it set something off. The works did something to each other. How do I say this?

KA: Well, they establish the work as intertwined.

ZL: Absolutely.

KA: It always has been intertwined, but I was so happy that was your first show with us (In the Wake, 2016). My first experience working closely with you was a show that put photography and sculpture on the same level in terms of how you’re using those works as a thread for all of the concerns that you’re trying to address. I’d seen your photographs before then, but I had never seen a sculpture of yours in person, except for the 2014 Camera Obscura in the Whitney Biennial. So that show was critical to my understanding of how sculpture and photography and installation are equally important in your practice.

ZL: That’s really nice to hear, Kate. That show was a turning point for me in some ways. I had been working with material from my family’s history, taking photo-graphs of old snapshots from the period of time right after the Second World War, when they had been dis-placed by the war. On one level it was a very person-al show because I was working with depictions of my family members, but at the same time I was interested in engaging with broader themes of statelessness and displacement, and with contemporary issues around refugees and immigration. The book stacks served a particular purpose in that show in that they indicated a larger cultural context. The stacks introduce issues of image reproduction, distribution, and mass consumption, a larger world where news travels, and where images are part of our identity formation, and part of our historic record. The book stacks turn the tables; instead of being a viewer, you are being addressed as a photographer. I’ve worked with a number of these photo manuals and guides now, and one thing that interests me about them is that they address the reader as a photographer. It’s kind of obvious, but it does something to the relationship. There is a direct form of address to you, as a person who takes pictures. So, it shifts something, it implicates you, or involves you in the action. It turns the attention to the viewer: What about your snapshots? Do you have a family album? What does it look like? What are you taking pictures of? How are you representing your life in your pictures? I think at this moment in time, the camera plays so many roles in our lives, we take the constant presence of cameras completely for granted, we can’t yet see the effect this is having on us, and how much we have come to use photography in construct-ing our understanding of self, community, belonging, identity, nationality, of personhood.

‘How To Take Good Pictures’ will be on view as part of Hauser & Wirth’s presentation at Art Basel Unlimited, from 13 – 16 June 2019.