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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
Think
Thinking
Incredibly
Appear
Simple
Making
Hard
Things

More quotes by 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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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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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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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'm in all of my work, and there's nowhere to hide when you make work.
Zoe Leonard
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I'm always learning. I can't imagine doing anything else.
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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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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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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I never heard the term art world until I was in my thirties, and I was like, What are you guys talking about? It's the world, and we all live in the world!
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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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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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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I'm always amazed at how people make work no matter how intense the pressure.
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 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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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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There's a lot of psychological material that you inherit from your family.
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