Being in Pictures

“Joanne Leonard will play an important role in the history of 20th-century culture, art, and photo history for her daring and innovative subject matter . . . her complex and multi-layered works address women’s life narratives, twinship, dementia, miscarriage, parenting, and the stages and conditions of female subjectivity.”
—Griselda Pollock, University of Leeds

Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir interweaves the extraordinary photography and collage work of artist Joanne Leonard with personal narrative to reveal the creative possibilities of feminist art.

Leonard’s early photographs were largely documentary, capturing scenes from inner-city Oakland and the Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan. As her art evolved she began to challenge the boundary between personal and public images, and her work turned to autobiographical and daringly intimate themes, including a failed marriage, a miscarriage, single motherhood, her identity as twin and daughter of a Jewish immigrant, and the problems of aging and memory.

Leonard’s evocative and often dreamlike creations reveal “the tensions between realism and idealization, photography and fantasy.” These are pictures that both capture and re-create life in images that are haunting, tender, heartbreaking, and sometimes shocking—but always completely true.