River as a Verb

Pradeep Dalal: I encountered this body of work of Zoe’s first through the book she did with the publisher Gato Negro, El río /The River, a collaboration with the poet and activist Dolores Dorantes. Seeing the images in that book and the images of installation views from shows, it struck me that one of the incredibly important things she’s doing is making the images modestly sized and scaled, not monumental. There are hundreds of images, and she sequences them and thinks of them as a continuum of experience rather than as individual images. Even encountering the work online, as I’ve had to do, since I’m in Mumbai, the installations seem like breathing, pulsing, living things. It’s not easy to pull something like that off. I also like the idea that there’s no beginning or end. You just step right into it. She’s working across genres—landscape, infrastructure, bridges, checkpoints, train tracks, river flows, flowers. But the tonal range, the gradations of the gray, the milky skies, the image quality of the gelatin silver prints, are exceptionally consistent. That might seem traditional, in a particular way, but I think it’s actually speaking to our image culture, to how we process, absorb and look at images. As a reference point, I was thinking of Lewis Baltz and what he wrote in an essay for his book Park City (1980), that working in series allows points to be raised, asserted through repetition, critiqued, restructured into subcategories. A visual syntax can be evolved. The effect is comparable to that of a nonnarrative film. He uses the term that Larry Sultan used for nonnarrative film, a “paper movie.” So that’s my thought about my direct experience with Zoe’s images, but I also wanted to add a thought about something I recently read about immigration and borders. It was a review of a new video work by Javier Téllez, in which he found eight Venezuelan immigrants living in New York and hired them to be collaborators in making the work, which riffed on Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). One of the collaborators, Jesús Ramírez, described fleeing Venezuela pursued by military assassins and the seven months of brutal travel that followed. In the video work, he was asked to play one of a group of storm troopers who marched to the real army chant that Venezuelan soldiers used to declare themselves as war machines. Ramírez said it made him start to think about the kinds of war machines that migrants must become to reach safety, because, he says—and I’m quoting from him here—“we need to focus so hard, so intensely, and to just keep going and going and going to confront all kinds of danger.” I’d never ever thought of immigrants and the hardships they face in such militarized terms before, but seeing Zoe’s images of the access points to get to America and the militarized architecture that’s been built up around it at the border reframed my thinking.

Natalia Brizuela: I’ve been thinking both about this work of Zoe’s and why she would’ve wanted me to participate in this conversation. I’ve also been thinking a lot about the fact that at so many points throughout the history of photography there has been an intense global political scenario taking place. If we go back to the so-called origins of photography, the 1830s and 1840s, a certain world that was organized around empires and bordering was beginning to crumble. Then you go to the 1970s and the place of the world that I focus on, which is Latin America and the Caribbean, and the domination of military dictatorships as capital was reorganizing the ways in which it would continue to control the world. In that context, I was thinking of Zoe’s decision to make this project and to spend so much time at the border during the rise of extremely fascist or neo-fascist or proto-fascist governments, both in the U.S. and in a lot of other places around the world. I came to feel that Zoe, or Zoe’s project, as opposed to taking something from the border, was a gift. I say this because the long history of the relationship between photography and extractivism is something we are all aware of, that has been talked about a lot. Constructing borders is also a way of taking away the possibility of movement, primarily from people, and photography has been part of that. We look at the photographs taken by the United States border commission, formed to establish the exact border locations between the U.S. and Mexico. They are very unspectacular photographs that assisted in the making of permanent political boundaries, fixing the precise divisions. Zoe is asking: What is the relationship between photography and fixing? I think she turns to the border and instead of fixing something, taking away movement and possibility, she gives. Even the title she gives to the project, in Spanish, Al río—to the river—suggests this. It’s giving something to the river, an offering. You give something to someone. The violence imposed on the river through bordering and through U.S. expansionism is, in a way, returned to the river in this gesture. There’s an attempt to undo what colonial habitation and photography as its tool have tried to take from the place. As I looked at the book, I kept feeling I was watching a film, but a film that itself is questioning what a film would be. Photography is always generating borders as a medium—what is inside and what is outside of the frame? Al río seems like a gesture toward trying to undo something that is natural to bordering, to liberal democracy and to the medium of photography itself.

TJ: I think the paper movie idea is totally in keeping with this work because it works between photographic fixity and autonomous surveillance. The exclusions, I think, are actually where the work happens—a rejection of any claim of mastery or sublimity in the images, which has historically contained a certain idea of control of the land and also a right of extraction. One of the next questions I wanted to ask you all is about the presence, or mostly the absence, of human subjects in this work and the role of portraiture, in which subjects become subject matter. Also a related question about the absence of words. The photos don’t have orienting text, such as individual titles or captions or place names. Text appears sometimes in the frame, in the world.

I feel like the presence and absence of people and the conditions under which people appear is one of the most interesting things about the project. As social documentary work, it’s very unexpected.

PD: There is an element of scrupulousness with the way Zoe approaches it. It made me think of a film by an Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, titled, in English, A River Called Titas (1973). It’s about a community around a river. One of the opening frames is a lovely image of the river. There is a woman standing on the banks as it’s raining, and the camera pans from her feet and goes up to her mid- torso and then the image gets washed out with the rain. It made me think about the human body as part of the river and of nature—and, in this case, brown bodies in a particular landscape that they belong to, which is East Bengal. I was really struck by that image and it made me think more critically about social-documentary ways of documenting migrants and their paths across borders, across rivers.

NB: In the Al río book, Tim, you and Zoe chose to include a poem by Natalie Diaz in which she reminds us that the river is in us and that we are the river, not least because we are mainly water as human beings. It’s not about the river, Diaz tells us, but about rivering. It’s not a thing, but an action, and it has to do precisely with movement. So maybe that’s one reason why there’s no centrality given to the human figure in the work. Because the human figure, at least the one that photography can represent, would inevitably be an inscription of a form of habitation of the planet that exercises violence, historically, against another understanding of habitation in which human bodies and bodies of water are one and the same, necessarily interrelated. Portraiture would actually complicate that, would make it very problematic. A large number of the photographs don’t even show the river or something that looks like a river. You’re seeing something else, the surroundings, or places where you can’t reach the river. As to the absence of text and titles and captions, it’s very interesting to me. If she had named the photographs, she would’ve been pushing the images into that old relationship with the cartographic, with taxonomy, which is at the heart of the history that has been told around the medium. So the refusal of naming is another attempt, just like the refusal of privileging the human body, at re-inscribing the river as part of a particular kind of ontological understanding of the world.

TJ: Ken, you’ve made a kind of epic, epistemically profound body of work and a book, Lynching in the West, 1850 –1935 (2006), that has so much to do with presence and absence, including your own role as a modifier of existing images and producer of new ones. What does the idea of human absence in Al río say to you?

KGD: Obviously, there are lots of things that resonate for me in her project, and one is certainly the region. My family is from the Southwest back to its beginning, and this idea of who belongs where and who gets called what is something that I’ve been around all of my life as part of the identity politics of the region. It continues to surface in our political debates around who belongs and who doesn’t, and the threat of the other that has reached a fever pitch with Trump. I started approaching the killing of Latinos in the Southwest, the lynching and other acts of violence perpetrated by mostly white community groups that also targeted Native Americans, Asians—mostly Chinese, but also Filipino—and others. I was trying to find a way to tell that history because most Americans, along with others, still don’t know it. Those histories are always erased. In every conversation, they’re erased over and over again. They don’t get into the textbooks, don’t get anywhere. And so the act of erasure, in my own work, is a part of a frustration or realization that I won’t live long enough to see a change in these dynamics, that there’s no way anything I can do as an individual will make a difference in a history that’s written over me and continues to occupy spaces where some of my family has lived for a couple hundred years. By removing the body from historic images of lynchings, I create a visibility. When I look at Zoe’s work and books, I think about all of the invisible histories of Latinos who were lynched on both sides, by Mexicans and by Americans, and all the Indigenous Mexicans who were lynched. What I recognize in her strategy, which is moving and powerful, is bringing in so many other voices, including us in the conversation here today, and adding those voices to an unembodied representation of this region. Rather than her owning the discourse, she’s using her authority to create a series of venues where different voices might emerge. She uses openness—what I have probably called absence in my work—but you could think of it also as a kind of openness, a discursive space, a symbolic space, an ambivalence space, territory that is uninhabited and that can be reclaimed or not reclaimed. I think maybe each of us here brings some new life out of that space, some perspective that we’re trying to open up.

PD: I agree with Ken about the importance of the other voices that the work brings in, and I would push even a little harder to urge that these voices are made legible in other parts of the world. For example, Zoe’s books are not available in India, and I don’t know where these images are going to live in a public way. How accessible are they to artists and photographers in other parts of Latin America, or in Asia? So I think it’s a very important point, not just for her work but for that of many other artists and thinkers. Last year, there was an exhibition in Mumbai about 19th-century British photography of architecture and archeology, drawn from the British Library’s collection and shared with a museum in Mumbai. What was really interesting is that they said the glass negatives and the paper negatives were too fragile to travel. So they made digital negatives and had prints produced in Kolkata. All the documentation of architecture and archaeology in India from the 1840s to the 1950s is British, primarily. There were a couple of Indian photographers who had access to a studio and a camera, and who could afford to print, but very few. A vast amount of knowledge of photography in India, the archaeological sites of India, the architecture of India in the 19th century, is held in Great Britain. And the claim about the fragility of the original negatives was perhaps just the British Museum thinking: What if we send the originals and the Indian museum refuses to return them? All of those things were unsaid, the subtext of these kinds of exchanges. If you go to the British Library’s website, for example, and try to find these images for research, you find nothing. I mean, nothing comes up. So Indian photographers, Indian architectural historians, have no way to study it here. And this thought about access is connected to the Mexico-United States border issues. The third-largest group of migrants coming in through the southern U.S. border are Indian. The fifth largest are Chinese. So no longer is it just a Latin American and Caribbean question. The border is ultra real for many groups of people coming from all over the world. So the dynamic of Zoe’s work and what it’s speaking to is much broader than we might imagine. And I think it behooves us to think about how these images and stories are made available to larger audiences.

NB: I wanted to get back, briefly, to Ken’s point about, as a photographer, asking yourself whether you should continue making photographs. Why do you make them? As an intellectual, professor, academic and critic, I ask myself the question of why I do what I do. And I’ve been asking it a lot lately, in the face of so many horrors that are happening, of a planet that we all somehow participate in destroying, even if we’re critical of the machinery and the systems that are destroying it. How to make what we do relevant? How can we make the privilege that we all have in different ways matter? I’ve spent most of my professional life thinking and writing about images. But recently, I have been thinking a lot about listening. The kind of crisis of hegemony that we are all witnessing now, the hegemony of the image, the hegemony of liberal democracy, of the nation-state and its borders, presents a time when we have to become even more attentive, practice a form of intentional, careful listening. Because there’s something that’s making noise and, in that noise, if we listen more closely we might have the power to make the grammar of violence legible. In my teaching, I’ve come to realize that young people often do not know how to listen, because all they do is consume bits of information. Our hyper-modern world has robbed them of the ability to listen, which means an ability to concentrate. And in listening, what you start understanding are the intervals, which is why the visible borders on Zoe’s photographs are so important. They’re a reminder that, as much as what you see matters, what you don’t see matters. The question is how to translate that into our practices, whether as a photographer or a critic, a curator or a poet or just a member of society. I don’t have an answer to that question, but I just want to put that on the table. In the absence of words in Zoe’s project, there is an invitation to listen, because words, once they get written, seem to signify a predetermined set of things.

TJ: I think you point out one of the key elements in the work, to me. The quietness in the photographs is both at the surface of the images and between them. It creates places of attunement.

KGD: To Natalia’s point, one of the things that I’ve experienced in coming back from the pandemic is that idea of different listening, of getting students to slow down and see the world differently and to disengage from the social media experience that now shapes their reality. And photography, especially film, has been one way I’ve tried to make that happen. I emphasize the idea of the in-between space, the moment up to the photograph. I use the metaphor of sketching, that their first roll is like a sketchbook. I also tell them they don’t even have to put any film in the camera at first. Just look through it. Then when we do take a picture, how’s that going to change what we’ve seen and thought? That idea of listening and slowing down is, for me, part of the energy-giving power that we still have even in these dark days. That’s where art—or whatever we want to call that space—keeps giving, replenishes me in ways that nothing else can.

PD: We do have to think about how the camera now shapes our perception. This afternoon the monsoons broke in Mumbai, and I was taking a picture out of the window and the sky was dark, gray on gray. But my phone camera compensated and gave me a much bluer sky and a much sharper rendering than my eyes could actually see. What are the phone camera and the algorithm doing to the process of perception? I think of Zoe’s photographs, the gray and muted tones. There is something about a gelatin silver print that reads completely differently from the glass on your phone or your monitor. It changes the way you encounter the image and how it correlates to your actual experience. But then again, the availability of the phone camera and the means for sending images immediately out into the world has changed equations of power. When Zoe’s work asks what happens when a part of our control is given to others, it’s a timely question. In India now, for example, there are so many cheap camera phones suddenly on the streets, so many tools now available to people who are not part of a professional class, not trained as artists. And some of the stuff I’ve seen on Instagram by kids from small villages is fantastic, game changing. America and Europe are different equations altogether. Wealth creates its own set of concerns. Here the vibrancy in the street and on the ground is incredible and this is being shown in ways that feel authentic and new.

NB: It makes me think, in an odd way, about the great Brazilian photographer Claudia Andujar. She had begun her career working as a photojournalist. She was sent on a trip in the 1970s to photograph the Yanomami people, who live on the borders of Guyana, Venezuela and Brazil. She went into the rain forest and the climate, the heat and humidity, literally broke her camera. She realized she had to adjust her camera. She ended up making very interesting images with all kinds of filters, putting gel and wax on the lens. But more interestingly, the situation moved her to begin to ask the Yanomami people to make images themselves, not using a camera but using felt-tip pens, to make drawings. And so her images and the drawings end up living together, making something in between. I came upon this story when I was young, in my early twenties, and I became obsessed with it in terms of what it offers us, an invitation to pay attention to the break, to the effect of things not working. I’m very curious right now to see where breaking or allowing things to break and not needing to fix them could lead us. Why are we always repairing? Maybe it’s time to let some things break.

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New York-based artist Zoe Leonard balances rigorous conceptualism with a distinctly personal vision in her work, which merges photography, sculpture and installation. By employing strategies of repetition, shifting perspectives and a multitude of printing processes, Leonard probes the politics of representation and display. Her work explores themes such as gender and sexuality, loss and mourning, migration, displacement and the urban landscape.

Natalia Brizuela is a writer and a professor of Spanish and Portuguese and of film and media at the University of California, Berkeley.

Pradeep Dalal is an artist and writer. He co-chaired the photography M.F.A. program at Bard College from 2015 to 2020. He directs the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in New York.

Ken Gonzales-Day is a Los Angeles-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice considers the historical construction of race and the limits of representational systems.

Tim Johnson is a poet and editor. He runs Agave Festival Marfa and the Marfa Book Co., a bookstore, publisher and gallery in Marfa, Texas.

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Support for the artwork has been given by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Hauser & Wirth.

“Zoe Leonard: Al río / To the River” is on view at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, through June 22, 2025.