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I'd grown up poor I had no idea what it was like to be comfortable.

Zoe Leonard

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Zoe Leonard
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: January 1
Activist
Artist
Photographer
Printmaker
Video Artist
Liberty
New York
Grown
Comfortable
Poor
Idea
Ideas
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More quotes by Zoe Leonard

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I don't quite understand how a generation and a half after the Second World War we've gotten where we are now.
Zoe Leonard
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I'm in all of my work, and there's nowhere to hide when you make work.
Zoe Leonard
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I grew up in Harlem, but I moved to the Lower East Side when I was a teenager and it was ... I feel like when I try to describe it, it doesn't sound believable. It just sounds like you're lying. And I see it on the faces of my younger friends.
Zoe Leonard
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We're all busy. It's a very fast-paced world. And art - and by that, I mean culture in a wider sense - is one of the few spaces where we're allowed to look and think without an immediate response or reaction.
Zoe Leonard
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I've been taking pictures since I was probably 16. I'm 54, and I can't believe how excited I am.
Zoe Leonard
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Something about photography is tied to a very specific relationship with the material world. It doesn't have to be, but the way I practice it, it is. So there's an act of observation, but it's not an act of objective recording. It's about framing something and seeing it and understanding that it's relational.
Zoe Leonard
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There's a desire for me in the work, even when I'm looking at the past, to be looking from the present. It's to be here now. It's looking in the present tense.
Zoe Leonard
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Progress is always an exchange. We gain something, we give something else up. I'm interested in looking at some of what we are losing.
Zoe Leonard
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The career has to support the making and can offer a platform, can offer you a voice in the world. And that's an incredible thing. But it's complicated and seductive and weird and tricky. I think you have to keep figuring that out your whole life.
Zoe Leonard
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Making work for me is being in the world, but it's also being specific about being in the world. I'm interested in this increasingly rare space of contemplation and taking the time and energy to be thoughtful.
Zoe Leonard
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You need to have your eyes open because it's really scary what's happening.
Zoe Leonard
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I'm always learning. I can't imagine doing anything else.
Zoe Leonard
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What I've always liked about photography is that it's such a direct way of showing what's on my mind. I see something. I show it to you.
Zoe Leonard
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I really loved music and went to a lot of clubs to see bands and dance. I loved going out.
Zoe Leonard
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The world feels overwhelming to me on every level. Just the number of organisms that live on this planet. Our politics, our violence, psychology, emotions there's just a lot going on, right?
Zoe Leonard
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When people look at a photograph, they believe it... My photographs crawl along that edge. I document the world, but from my own biased point of view.
Zoe Leonard
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I'll finish a body of work and think, Okay, I got nothing. That was it. I'm done. And then you'll turn a corner and be like, Oh my God! And it keeps happening. I feel so lucky.
Zoe Leonard
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If the work is the horse, a career makes a great cart.
Zoe Leonard
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I'm always amazed at how people make work no matter how intense the pressure.
Zoe Leonard
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I like getting stuff out of the way so you can see something clearly, see it sharply, have it be new again.
Zoe Leonard