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I think making things that appear simple is incredibly hard.

Zoe Leonard

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Zoe Leonard
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: January 1
Activist
Artist
Photographer
Printmaker
Video Artist
Liberty
New York
Hard
Things
Think
Thinking
Incredibly
Appear
Simple
Making

More quotes by Zoe Leonard

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I'd grown up poor I had no idea what it was like to be comfortable.
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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.
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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.
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I'm always learning. I can't imagine doing anything else.
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I was really poor for most of my adult life.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I really loved music and went to a lot of clubs to see bands and dance. I loved going out.
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What attracts me in photography is not so much a fine arts approach, but rather photographs as documents... All the ways in which human beings have documented the world in an attempt to order it, in an attempt to consume it or rule it or hang on to it in some sense.
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.
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I choose to work behind the camera. And I kind of want to make the work and then run away. The presentation of myself really feels complicated for me.
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 in all of my work, and there's nowhere to hide when you make work.
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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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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By nature, I'm a little distractible. I get very overwhelmed by the world.
Zoe Leonard
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I don't think any of us thought Donald Trump could get this far.
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