Zoe Leonard | Aerials

About

This exhibition, the artist’s first at the London gallery, focuses on a series of aerial photographs created in the mid to late 1980s.

Leonard’s work – at once rigorously conceptual and highly personal – has engaged with themes such as the history of photography, loss and mourning, gender and sexuality, migration, displacement, and the urban landscape. Leonard has always taken an experimental approach. With a longstanding interest in vernacular, popular, and practical uses of photography, Leonard is drawn in particular to the deadpan appearance of photographs used in science, mapping and archiving; modes of representation that are also systems for classification and interpretation. Much of her practice calls into question the impartiality of these images and the ways in which the uses of photography have altered modern visual culture. As Leonard explains, ‘Photography can be a means to document the real world – to convey information – but at the same time, it is a highly subjective medium, inherently reflecting the viewpoint of the photographer.’