Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
Tate Collection
Works with images
General Collection
Tate American Fund
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/zoe-leonard-4828" aria-label="More by Zoe Leonard" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Zoe Leonard</a>
July 19 frame 33
Presented by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery, courtesy of the North American Acquisitions Committee 2016
paper print photograph gelatin silver
July 19, frame 33
support: 324 × 449 mm
image: 259 × 385 mm
Presented by the <a href="/search?gid=999999976" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">American Fund for the Tate Gallery</a>, courtesy of the North American Acquisitions Committee 2016
<div><div></div><p><i>July 19, frame 33</i><span> 2011 is from Zoe Leonard’s extensive series </span><i>Sun Photographs</i><span>, black and white photographs that she took from the roof of her apartment building in Brooklyn, New York, pointing the camera directly at the sun. She started the series in 2011. Each photograph records the appearance of the sky at a particular time on a particular date, and each is named with the date of the exposure, and its frame number from that day’s exposures. The photographs are made with black and white film and printed full frame without cropping, which is typical of Leonard’s practice, so each has a thin black border. They are gelatin silver prints, and Leonard prints each photograph herself. The prints are minimal in appearance; because the image of the sky is so subtle, the viewer becomes aware of other components of the photographs, all of which play a part in the composition alongside the image itself: the black frame, the flares and glares caused by sunlight reflecting off the glass of the camera lens, the grain, and the slight traces of the developing fluids that remain on the surface of the print as a residue of the developing process. The prints remind the viewer of the apparatus of photography at two different moments in their production: the glass lens at the moment of exposure and the paper and chemicals at the moment of developing.</span></p><p><span>This is one of seven </span><i>Sun Photographs</i><span> in Tate’s collection (Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/leonard-april-4-frame-2-p14630" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P14630</span></a>–<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/leonard-january-27-frame-8-p14636" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P14636</span></a>). There are important differences between them. They differ in size and four are landscape in format, three are portrait. The sun appears in different sections of the frame and the tones of each photograph are very different. Sometimes the sun is a small precise circle surrounded by a grey ring, for example in </span><i>January 23, frame 8 </i><span>2011 (Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/leonard-january-23-frame-8-p14633" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P14633</span></a>); in other photographs, such as </span><i>July 19, frame 33</i><span>, a more diffuse ring of light appears. In </span><i>April 5, frame 10</i><span> (Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/leonard-april-5-frame-10-p14632" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P14632</span></a>) and </span><i>February 27, frame 30</i><span> (Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/leonard-february-27-frame-30-p14634" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P14634</span></a>) a large area of bright light appears to one side of the sun. Leonard showed a group of </span><i>Sun Photographs</i><span> together in two exhibitions – at Gisela Capitain in Cologne in 2011 and at Camden Arts Centre in London in 2012. In both cases the photographs were shown alongside a camera obscura installation. When the photographs are displayed together in a single space they form an installation. The viewer is invited to take time to appreciate the minimal differences between the prints. Leonard was marking a moment in time each instant she exposed her film; so too the viewer is made to mark the time spent as they move from one print to another in the installation.</span></p><p><span>Prior to starting her </span><i>Sun Photographs</i><span> Leonard had completed the monumental 400-part series of photographs </span><i>Analogue</i><span> in 2007, which she begun in 1998. This was shown at documenta 12 in Kassel in 2007 and at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, the same year. Leonard then worked on a travelling retrospective exhibition of her photographs that began at the Fotomuseum Winterthur in December 2007 before travelling to Vienna, Madrid and Munich. Leonard had not made any new photographs for a period of four years prior to beginning the </span><i>Sun Photographs</i><span>. The series can therefore be seen as a return to photography after a long break, as a new beginning after the efforts made to conclude </span><i>Analogue</i><span> and to mount a retrospective.</span></p><p><span>Beginning again has meant going back to the very basis of photography: light. Light is essential to photography and the origins of photography are about the attempt to fix images of light. As much as they rely on light, photographs are also vulnerable to light: too much light or too little and a photograph is over- or underexposed. A basic rule of photography therefore is not to point a camera at the sun. In flouting this, Leonard exposes photography’s vulnerability and produces images that are opaque and difficult rather than precise. With the kind of camera Leonard uses it is impossible to create ‘sharp’ images of the bright sun, which in her prints is hard to discern. The viewer is unsure of what exactly they are seeing, and left in a state that feels like temporary blindness. Historian Briony Fer has written, ‘They are cloudy photographs without being of clouds. The effect is more like the cloudiness in an old person’s eye – a film over the eye that casts not a shadow but a blur.’ (Fer 2012, unpaginated.)</span></p><p><span>The </span><i>Sun Photographs</i><span> are about the vulnerability of photography and about the difficulties of looking. They can be distinguished from formal studies of skies, most famously Alfred Stieglitz’s (1864–1946) </span><i>Equivalents</i><span> 1925–34. Leonard herself has said ‘I’m interested in the abstract possibilities of photography. By choosing a subject which is impossible to depict, I’m exploring a way of depicting sight, experience, and the actual process of perception.’ (Zoe Leonard, press release for </span><i>Available Light</i><span>, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne 2011.)</span></p><p><span>Leonard’s interests in vulnerability extend to the way she develops the photographs using outmoded analogue printing processes. Just as the film is reliant on, yet vulnerable to light, so the prints rely on the changeable qualities of the paper and developing fluids. Analogue processes can yield an extraordinary tonal range, which Leonard exploits, but they are also necessarily imprecise, and in these photographs slight traces of the chemicals are visible on the prints. Leonard also exploits photographic vulnerability by installing the photographs without frames and without glass, pinned to the walls by their four corners. This mode of presentation allows the viewer to look very closely at the surface of the prints, but, more importantly, the prints are also evidently naked and unprotected. Finally, Leonard displays the photographs in natural light, causing the different tonalities of the prints to change as a room brightens or darkens, and it also allows the viewer to appreciate that the experience of looking at images of the sun is dependent on ongoing weather conditions in the place of their encounter.</span></p><p><span>Leonard is part of a generation of American artists who have been politicised by the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. She was a member of ACT UP! and remains actively involved in many groups in the lesbian and gay community in New York. The </span><i>Sun Photographs</i><span> would seem disconnected from these aspects of her practice and more connected to her interests in the histories of abstraction and analogue photography. However the different ways in which the photographs are concerned with vulnerability allows a connection to be made to Leonard’s politics. Just as she has been concerned with the vulnerabilities of the body and of those sometimes excluded from the art world or from political representation, so in these works she is interested in the vulnerabilities of photography.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Zoe Leonard, </span><i>Photographs</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fotomuseum Winterthur 2007.</span><br/><span>Mark Godfrey, ‘Mirror Displacements: The Art of Zoe Leonard’,</span><i> Artforum</i><span>, vol.46, no.7, March 2009, pp.292–301.</span><br/><b>              </b><span>Briony Fer, ‘Observation Point’, exhibition pamphlet, Camden Arts Centre, London 2012.</span></p><p><i> </i></p><p><span>Mark Godfrey</span><br/><span>August 2012</span></p><div></div></div>
Summary
2024-05-31T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT