Roberto Tejeda on Zoe Leonard’s Al río / To the River at Chinati Foundation (Newsletter Volume 30)
For [George] Baker, Leonard’s determination to re-enchant the analog image con- firmed a technological “lateness” that in turn inaugurated an affective and corporeal “openness” to the world. Baker writes of this photography understood, in light of the A n a l o g u e series, “as inherently relational— affective and loving—its operations not just the indexical fixative of the double or the trace, but the unending (desiring) quest for similarity, comparison, connection, and analogy.” That is, Baker aligns “openness” in a system that relates reception to displacement, to endlessly mutable forms, to connectedness, enclosure, and layers of reflection in the interplay of likeness and desire. “To receive, for Leonard, is to want to bring the new object close, almost to draw it into the void of one’s camera—to incorporate the image, again, like one internalizes a lost object. And in the photo- graphs, we feel this drive everywhere enacted: physically, corporeally, psychically,” he stated.
[…]
In a lens perspective that has no particular purchase on a heightened sense of eventfulness, nor on a relation of detachment to the “man-altered land- scape” specified by exponents of the New Topographics, for instance, so many of the images in Al río / To the River render the middle distance from a standpoint, a certainty “in person,” so to speak. In this sense, active viewership resembles a form of embodied hesitation at the intervals—now unambiguous, now indiscernible—that open up between the built world, the natural landscape, and social processes along the border zone.
Zoe Leonard, “Out of Time,” artist questionnaire by George Baker, O c t o b e r , no. 100 (Spring 2002): 89, 95.
George Baker, Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography (University of Chicago Press, 2023), 56, 57.
…
What potion of forgetting pleases
reason that by neglect of its duty
so toils against itself for satisfaction?
But my affliction seeks solace, measure
of the desire to be remedied and
the desire to overcome it love’s remedy
[When from my counted days], Roberto Tejada
