Photography

Being in Pictures by Joanne Leonard

Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir

Joanne Leonard

Rights: World
For more info, contact Mary Bisbee-Beek at bisbeeb@umich.edu

Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir interweaves the remarkable photography and collage work of artist Joanne Leonard with a warm, compelling account of an artist's life and creative processes.

Leonard's evocative and often dreamlike creations have over four decades revealed "the tensions between realism and idealization" that exist in both photography and photocollage. Beginning with her earliest work—which recorded with equal energy and devotion the 1972 Winter Olympics, her neighborhood in inner-city Oakland, a kitchen countertop, and her own family—she worked to develop a photographic genre she called "intimate documentary."

As Leonard's art evolved, she began to challenge the boundary between personal and public images, and her work turned to autobiographical and daringly intimate themes, including the end of her marriage, a devastating miscarriage, and single motherhood. Her portraits of daughter Julia from birth onward constitute one of our most extensive and expressive portrayals by any photographer of a child's journey to adulthood.

Being in Pictures also explores notions of identity and loss, as Leonard probes in word and image the meanings of being a twin, her conflicted feelings toward an emotionally distant father who escaped the Nazis, and her response to her highly accomplished mother's slow decline from Alzheimer's disease.

Joanne Leonard is Diane M. Krikpatrick and Griselda Pollock Distinguished University Professor Art and Women’s Studies, Professor of Art, School of Art and Design, and Professor of Women’s Studies, College of LSA, University of Michigan. Her photographs and photo-collage works have been published in Gardner's Art Through the Ages, Janson’s History of Art, and Time Life Library of Photography. Her own writing appears in Modern Fiction Studies and Michigan Feminist Studies.

January 2008
276 pages, 212 photographs