Quote

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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Zoe Leonard
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: January 1
Activist
Artist
Photographer
Printmaker
Video Artist
Liberty
New York
Even
Work
Tense
Present
Looking
Desire
Past

More quotes by 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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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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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 like getting stuff out of the way so you can see something clearly, see it sharply, have it be new again.
Zoe Leonard
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I think making things that appear simple is incredibly hard.
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'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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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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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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I'd grown up poor I had no idea what it was like to be comfortable.
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 learning. I can't imagine doing anything else.
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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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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You need to have your eyes open because it's really scary what's happening.
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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There's a lot of psychological material that you inherit from your family.
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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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