MoMA Opens ZOE LEONARD: ANALOGUE Photographic Exhibit Today

The Museum of Modern Art presents Zoe Leonard: Analogue-a landmark photographic installation, which was acquired by the Museum in 2013-in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium from today, June 27 to August 30, 2015.

In 412 color and black-and-white photographs, Analogue (1998-2009) documents the changing landscape of 20th-century urban life as seen in vanishing mom-and-pop stores with decaying facades and quirky hand-written signs and the simultaneous emergence of secondary global markets like the rag trade. Zoe Leonard: Analogue is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator, with Drew Sawyer, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography.

Exploring the two-fold tradition of documentary and conceptual photography, Leonard's project is positioned within the tradition of the grand visual archives that extend from Eugène Atget's Paris and Walker Evans's America, to Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles and Martha Rosler's Bowery. The artist began photographing shops in her neighborhood on New York's Lower East Side in the late 1990s. Over the course of a decade, the project grew to include hundreds of photographs, displayed in serial grids organized into 25 chapters, that follow the global circulation of recycled merchandise-used T-shirts, old-fashioned shoes, discarded Coke advertisements, and old technology like Kodak camera equipment-to far-flung places in Eastern Europe, Africa, Cuba, and Mexico.

Roxana Marcoci says, "Analogue is an urgent document and poetic allegory of globalization and the push for technological innovation, revealing the movement of goods and the homogenization of diverse geographical locations in the 21st century."