Joy, 2001, C-print. Image size: 10 3/4 x 10 3/4; paper size: 12 x 12" [Enlarge in New Window]

Zoe Leonard: Analog

Window-shopping is a revered, nearly congenital habit among city-dwellers, for whom a stroll through even the most familiar streets is not just a perambulation but an act of cultural anthropology offering enlightened and rapidly shifting views of the world through the goods it has on offer and the way it advertises and displays them.

Zoe Leonard is a lifelong Manhattan resident and an internationally exhibited artist who works with found objects in both sculpture and photography. When she looks into a shop window, she sees an accidental still-life, a cabinet of wonders that instantly conveys the class and character of a place as well as the personalities that shape it. "Stop at any bodega on the Lower East Side," says Leonard of the neighborhood where she has lived and worked for 22 years. "What's in the window? It's not Heineken beer, it's Presidente. You get a sense of who's living there, where they came from, what they eat, how much money they have."

The Lower East Side has traditionally been a casbah of small shops and pushcarts run by individual entrepreneurs who made, imported, and distributed goods that one just couldn't seem to get anywhere else -- handmade pillows, one-of-a-kind ties, barrel pickles, fancy fabrics, religious articles for every known religion -- or at better prices. Chinese restaurants, kosher butchers, botanicas, and bodegas coexisted with betting parlors and check-cashing facilities situated near the liquor stores and, possibly, a church.

For Leonard, who grew up poor on the edge of Harlem, the impulse to photograph these shops came partly out of a (well-founded) fear of gentrification and its threat of displacement, and partly from the urban vernacular in which she centers her creative practice. "I think there's a quotidian beauty in everyday life," she says. "Walk down Delancey Street and look at the bras and panties and sneakers, the plastic flowers laid out in rows. I think there's beauty at the laundromat around the corner."

Leonard has seen her neighborhood change many times, but when a tobacconist or a deli moved out, another generation or ethnic group usually moved in. Then, in the 1990s, as leases ran out, property developers swooped in to raise commercial rents and convert the old tenements and flophouses to luxury apartments and condominiums. One small business after another closed permanently and their owners retired or moved away, with serious repercussions for pedestrian life around them.

In 1998, Leonard began to photograph -- in color, instead of her usual black-and-white -- what for her had always been defining elements of the neighborhood, before they disappeared altogether. The project is now, in its fifth year, nearing completion, Leonard has moved to Brooklyn, and her archive is big enough to wrap around a room, floor to ceiling. It contains thousands of images, not just from New York but Chicago, Havana, Warsaw, Israel, and the Palestinian territories. "I don't know how things went from local subsistence economies to McDonalds restaurants in Morocco," she says of the globalized nature of commercial trade today, documented at grassroots level in the best Walker Evans mold, "but this project has gone way beyond nostalgia." She calls the wheelbarrows, mismatched shoes, butcher shop windows, and bootleg designer handbags pictured in her archive "the potsherds and arrowheads" of a story she terms "complex, strange, and beautiful."

The final presentation of 500 images will be divided into "chapters" and groups for optimum viewing. "There are periods where you can see I'm into signage, or shoes, or piles of things," she says. "I don't know how to make art about universal truths, but if you look at the details, a very big picture unfolds."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Visual > Photography | Americana | The Built Environment | Labor | History | New York | 2000