Through photography, sculpture, and installation, Zoe Leonard balances rigorous conceptualism with a distinctly personal vision. Leonard’s work critically addresses a range of themes such as gender and sexuality, loss and mourning, migration and displacement, and the urban landscape. Conceived for her 2018 retrospective, How to Take Good Pictures debuted at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The work is composed of over 1,000 copies of an amateur photography guide published by Kodak first titled How to Make Good Pictures and later retitled How to Take Good Pictures. Stacking the guides chronologically, Leonard tracks the evolution of the publication over numerous editions and reprints. At once serial photograph and minimalist sculpture, the work is a meditation on the photographic act itself. The change in the titular verb, from ‘make’ to ‘take,’ signals the paradigm shift from the notion of subjectively ‘creating’ a picture to deliberately ‘capturing’ one. Rather than administering her own definition of ‘good pictures,’ Leonard invites viewers to deconstruct the notion themselves, in a powerful reminder that looking and image-making are never passive acts.
