A multimedia artist who has worked in sculpture, installation, and film, Zoe Leonard first exhibited her photographs in 1979 and has since established photography as her principal artistic medium. She has exhibited at Documenta IX and XII (1992 and 2007) and in two Whitney Biennials (1993 and 1997). Earlier this year, she received a mid-career retrospective at Fotomuseum Winterthur.

“My own neighborhood is filled with the signs of a local economy being replaced by a global one: small businesses being replaced by large corporations, multinationals taking over. The deeper I look, the more I realize that in looking into these shop windows, I am also looking out at the rest of the world. I think this is a unique moment to document, and an important one to archive. I know the world will never look quite this way again, and I feel that I want to look closely, to hold it near.”

- Zoe Leonard

A resident of the Lower East Side for more than 20 years, Leonard began taking pictures of the neighborhood in 1998 to record changes occurring as a result of the city’s economic transformation. Although centered on the Lower East Side and Brooklyn, the completed project (an archive of about 500 images) captures the wide-ranging forces of globalization, with specific attention to the route and final destination of New York’s castoff clothing in the contemporary rag trade. As such, Analogue is not only a meditation on the costs of urban redevelopment, but an exploration of the replacement of local markets by a global economy. As its name suggests, Analogue is also an elegy of sorts to a long-standing tradition of documentary photography, from Atget to Walker Evans, which Leonard sees passing with the onset of digital photography.

The images presented here comprise a portfolio of 40 dye transfer prints, an increasingly rare process of color printing that is itself in jeopardy of obsolescence.