Interanimation in Joanne Leonard’s Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir (2008)

Abstract

US-American artist Joanne Leonard’s book Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir generates a life-grounded sequencing of the photographic images she has created, each series marking the different temporalities of one woman’s life in its multiple voices. Images are juxtaposed to the artist’s reflective text on the political-subjective moments from which the images emerged, locating both her work and her retrospective writing in their changing conditions of existence shaped by place, class, gender, sexuality, desire, loss, and mourning. Pollock explores Leonard’s hybridity as interanimation with both memoir-writing by women and feminist theories of women’s autobiography as structurally ‘missing’ in a phallocentric culture, becoming a story only in a covenant of reading by other women that effectively ‘differences’ the genre of life-writing itself.

1 Being in Pictures

In 2008, the US-American artist Joanne Leonard (b. 1940, Fig. 1) published, having conceived, devised, and designed, an artwork in book form (Leonard 2008). It plots out her artistic practice in and with photography, while commenting on her life of practice in a text, written at the time of undertaking, as memory work. This produces an aesthetic interanimation by which the concept of ‘lived, suffered and remembered life’ comes to be discovered by the artist, and then formulated in the doubled space of the photographic image—some with its own script elements—and of writing in the first person, a writing that enacts its own reading, from the time-space of creating the book, of the work and the artist who had made the work who also becomes its first, and repeated reader. Titled Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir (Fig. 2), the book generates a life-grounded sequencing of the images marking the different temporalities of one woman’s multiple voices, a plurality engendered via artistic practice over time and in written retrospect on the political-subjective moments from which the images emerged, thus locating both work and reflection in the changing conditions of their existence (Leonard 2008).

Fig. 1

Joanne Leonard, Joanne Leonard in the Mirror with Camera silver print, early 1960s ©Joanne Leonard

Fig. 2

Joanne Leonard, Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir (2008) see 5

Visually, the book reveals an expanded practice in which the changing forms of the analogue and digital photographic image are extended with collage, overlays, transparencies, handwritten text, found images, and shaped forms (Fig. 3). The images are sometimes single, or forming series, and latterly being combined on scrolls in memory of Torah scrolls, medieval illuminated manuscripts, and reels of celluloid associated photography as well as with Hollywood, the artist’s place of birth and coming of age. No one term captures Leonard’s creative interplay of image-making with its material and semiotic histories and the cultural referencing of both ancient-manual and modern-technological modes of image-text production and its original, self-reflexive text.

Fig. 3

In My Mother’s Garden from Frieze, Not Losing Her Memory series, collage and white ink on silhouette paper 8.5 × 12 ins, 1991/1992

The contents page of Being in Pictures produces a thematic map of a life’s work, the images and their moments reclassified conceptually: The Latent Image, Double Exposure, Decisive Moments, Night Photography, Travels with Camera, Reproduction, Darkroom Alchemy, Home Industry, and so forth. The lives the book delivers into vision—as much to its author as to the reader—are multiple: those of daughters, of identical girl twins, of the home of a single working mother, and, above all, of an artist whose practice was inspired and, in her own words, enabled by emergent post-1968 feminist cultural practice and theory. Both provided vocabularies for attention to women’s lived experiences as politically, socially, and culturally pre-formulated and policed, however much each one of us has lived our singular histories and psyches. The women’s movement also transvalued the analysis of situated reflection on the specificity of each woman’s negotiation of a patriarchal culture within a racialized capitalist system and of the systemic forces that women as writers and artists would creatively expose and thus articulate their resistance in these moments of individual and collective self-discovery.

In 2011, Joanne Leonard stated:

As I look back, I realize that I was fashioning a feminist art practice before I really understood what such a practice might be. … Without the burgeoning feminist art movement of this era, there would not have been a place for some of my more radical work—work that revealed bodies, dwelt on reproductive loss, and celebrated women in images of daily life rather than in newsworthy moments. (Leonard 2008, 99)

2 Hybrid?

Leonard’s book about a life-long art practice participates in the category of life-writing through its formally composed juxtaposition of text and image (Fig. 4a and b) that frames a historical artistic practice with a voice situating the making of each image or images set in terms of a current, hence retrospective, account of the remembered impulse behind and the project realized by each work. In what sense, however, is this book Being in Pictures an example of the hybridity of either ‘text and image’ or ‘life and writing’?

Fig. 4

(a and b) Spreads from Joanne Leonard, Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir (2008), pp. 6–7, showing: Joanne’s Studio View, 1990s, and Joanne’s Kitchen, 2004, with Lupe’s Kitchen, silver print, 20 × 24 ins, 1970s and pp. 206–207 showing: Daycare Documents, silver print from laser copy transparencies with collage and white ink, 16 × 20 ins

In biology, hybridity refers to mixture as, for instance, when Charles Darwin experimented with cross-fertilization of plants. Darker connotations arose from the term’s Latin source in Roman culture where hybrida or ibrida referred to ‘the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar’, metaphorically implying the dilution of the purity in the progeny of a civilized Roman and a non-Roman ‘other’ that fed into a long and violent history of racial thinking infused with ideological adoption of biological notions to create the binary of purity and impurity. Hybridity is also a concept in linguistics. According to Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) there is an unconscious or organic tendency in all languages towards hybridity, which is dynamic and generative. In the creation of a new literary form such as the novel, with its inevitable polyvocality, Bakhtin also theorized ‘intentional hybridization’ where different idioms, discourses, and perspectives jostle productively without merging. Bakhtin developed the idea of interanimation: the novel produces a “system of languages that mutually and ideologically interanimate each other” (Bakhtin, 1981, 41–83). Combining text and image, two language or representational systems, Leonard’s work is I suggest not so much hybrid, an impure confusion of cultural modes, but interanimation.

Joanne Leonard’s subtitle An Intimate Photo Memoir introduces interanimation also with the genre of a memoir, additionally qualifying an already personalized category of writing with the concept of intimacy. Memoir is defined as a history or biography written from a personal point of view; it can also mean a commentary, a note to oneself, and is used as a reflexive tool in qualitative research. Intimate arrives in English from Latin, intimare, which can mean both ‘make familiar’ and ‘impress’. Intimus in Latin implies both physical or emotional closeness and inmost-ness, subjectivity rather than privacy.

Yet, making photographs and then writing about their making and meaning layering first-person narrative and with academically informed reflexivity, as in Leonard’s case, and publishing both as a book is, perhaps, the opposite of the intimate and the personal. Made public, the book solicits an engagement with situated subjectivity, however, by drawing the reader into a life-world re-created in text-framed history of images of the everyday that is specific to living as this woman, artist, mother, teacher, while the text layers the moments of life the images made permanent with contemporary, feminist-inflected analysis that is not reducible to narrative. The texts, on their own pages, voice a professional and consciously artistic practice endowing with cultural significance the spaces and relations, experiences and reflections that are ‘intimate’—about people loved and desired, emotionally charged life events of self and others, personal and professional decisions, areas that a feminist revolution in culture reclaimed as significant to breach the masculinist division between public and private that has itself been gendered and gendering. The interfacing of word and image in Leonard’s book as artwork—not just as text and image but as gendering in, of, and from the emotionally intense and economically precarious ‘feminine’ the very concepts of both life and writing—produces a form for visually inscribing an artist’s life that is also this woman’s life that, however, depends on and enacts a feminist transformation of all three concepts—artist, life, and woman—and of the genres in which we have typically represented each term.

3 Differencing Life

Life is not a gender-neutral term any more than is an artist’s life. Hence life-writing itself registers the potential and the deformations imposed by the systemic ordering of human subjectivity in sexual difference—understood here as it has been elaborated in post-structural feminist cultural theory¹ (Stone 2015; Pollock, 2022, 226–37). As a key provocation arising from feminist thought and practice, sexual difference is neither a fact nor a condition (both risk fixing of two elements or suggesting two distinct conditions). I propose the counter-force to such fixing with the move to the gerund: differencing (Pollock 1999). Differencing life-writing and differencing cultural hybridity across text and image within a feminist art practice and from a feminist perspective of cultural analysis sensitize us firstly and negatively to the structural inequalities and indifference of normative patriarchal culture that has privileged the white hetero-masculine as the human. Differencing helps us to appreciate the creative newness of, and necessity for, a feminist inflection of givens such as text, image, and life-writing. Feminist analysis, challenged and informed by postcolonial, queer, anti-racist, and inclusive ethics, does not assert a difference. It explores the always entangled possibilities and traumas of multiple layers of complexity within the plurality of a shared human condition of which sexual difference remains a critical and often a creative axis² (Arendt 1958).

From post-structuralist theorist Shoshana Felman’s deconstructive and psycho-analytical questioning of life-writing and autobiography, What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference (1993), let me draw a radical position on sexual difference and writing the self: “I will suggest that none of us as women has, as yet an autobiography. Trained to see ourselves as objects and positioned as Other … we have a story that by definition cannot be self-present to us, a story that is not a story, but must become a story. And it cannot become a story except through the bond of reading” (Felman 14, my emphasis).

If the validation of life experience—and hence life-writing as a mode of inquiry, academic, and literary—became a feature in the 1990s of the expanded feminist project, Shoshana Felman offered a monitory, but not a negative, position when discussing Nancy K. Miller’s Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Biographical Acts (Miller 1991). While Miller’s book seemed to link the personal to narrative and the confessional, another influential book by Carolyn Heilbrun on autobiography identified a problem in the lack of existing models for women’s writing of their lives and as the subject of ‘biographical’ lives (Heilbrun 1988). Shoshana Felman challenged both positions:

[O]ur own autobiography is not available to us, not simply because we have no models and because, inhabiting male plots, we are enjoined to transgress convention and to leave the realm of accomplishment to men (to live around a male center) but because we cannot simply substitute ourselves as centre without regard for the decentering effects of language and of the unconscious, without acute awareness of the fact that our own relation to a linguistic frame is never self-transparent. (Felman 156)

This is a double project, decentring what has been culturally and, in a sense, structurally centred in the masculine while accepting there is no easy recentring to be done because we are shaped by what we do not know, the unconscious, itself pre-structuring our imaginations and our language itself. We do not know what we are saying, or even who is speaking. For Felman, therefore, there can be no telling a life of a woman because woman is not a given entity, but a complex instance of split subjectivity always interwoven with others and already captured by the phallicism of language. Felman argues, however, that there may be a ‘becoming a story’. This in turn is not a singular act of writing. Becoming a story depends, she argues, upon the ‘covenant of reading by other women’, women reading being imagined as a community alert to the very difficulty of even proposing writing or reading ‘as a woman’. So, what follows is one reading of Being in Pictures.

4 Becoming

Joanne Leonard’s texts in Being in Pictures are short. They voice a subjectivity that knowingly articulates issues of sexual difference, often forced into consciousness through painful encounters with its societal and individual effects. Her words are composed and edited belatedly, at a distance, by a subject who is never contemporary with the ‘being in the images’ whose moments of making the writer is revisiting. Making this book-work solicited from the artist a new text to place and reframe the images produced over her long creative practice that makes visible the complex and sometimes painfully lived conjunction of being an artist with her camera as her artistic access to the world as imaged and as image (Fig. 1), and being a woman where, economically, professionally, historically, these two modes, being a woman and being an artist, especially when the artist chooses to be a mother and the single economic support for her desired child, are often in real tension. The conjunction of woman, artist, and mother has always existed in fact, while not being canonically acknowledged or included in the cultural mythology of the artist. Leonard specifically challenges that absenting.

The concepts of life as artist and life as woman have been pre-shaped in an historical asymmetry and deformed by a gendered hierarchy limiting what has constituted a culturally memorable and narratable life. The historic and singular subject worthy of recording by self or others has always been ideologically selective, shaped by power, class, race, gender, and sexuality. Women’s entry into the field involved shattering the conventions for a life worthy of inscription or representation³ (Tagg 1988). One founder of modernist and feminist life-writing, Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), was a daughter of Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), the founding editor of the grand, imperial-patriarchal Victorian/Edwardian project of a Dictionary of National Biography.⁴ It was envisioned as the exemplary writing of the lives of great men. In her innovative uses of the essay form and short books such as Room of One’s Own (Woolf 1929) and Orlando (Woolf 1928), Virginia Woolf undermined her father’s white patriarchal colonization of the identity of the writer. This problem exists also in the visual arts. From Otto Rank’s Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909/1914/2004) to Kris and Kurz’s Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist (1934, 1979), we find no women as heroes and certainly no artists, who are mothers, recorded. To create a space to write the life of the artist as a woman, a daughter, who has decided to be a mother, is to renovate existing models, and more to create one to accommodate what even Virginia Woolf, writing in 1928, felt unable to do: to write something about a woman’s body and her passions (Woolf [1931] 1979, 61).

Daringly, Joanne Leonard has been one of the very few artists, since Frida Kahlo’s daring work of the 1930s that only became known in the 1970s and even later, to confront pregnancy loss as the devastating trauma that it so often is a trauma reaching deep into the fold of psyche and sexuated body of a born woman. Some critics have argued, as a result of the work on miscarriage and her mother’s descent into dementia, that loss becomes the dominant theme of Joanne Leonard’s book. Grief and mourning do indeed lie side by side with rageous pain and desolation. I also sense that longing emerges as its affective thread.

In its broadest sense, life-writing is a construction of lines of intersection of several lives, reflected upon retrospectively, that produces, for the first time, a story that can be told, which is, as the result of this process, a discovery, new in the moment of writing, and ever provisional. The practice assembles scattered fragments to be re-articulated (jointing as much as voicing) as memories, perhaps supported by objects, images, or documents. Such elements have to be artistically transformed to formulate meaning for the first time—specifically by sequencing. Sequencing imposes order on the retrospective review of the lived life, the past tense of a living, present continuous, that was not lived autobiographically but, rather, in the future anterior, a constant anticipation between what is hoped for or what sometimes tragically happens to defeat what we imagine our projected life might become or what we dream it could be.

Leonard’s book has already attracted scholars of life-writing such as Sidonie Smith (Smith 2014) and Heilna du Plooy (du Plooy 2008), the latter having puzzled over the many connotations of the words of Leonard’s title Being in Pictures. Rather than ‘being in the images the photographer makes’—as an object of the camera’s gaze—du Plooy asks if Leonard’s sense of being in photography is like being in the movies, being in business—namely earning a living in a field of activity. Or is it a philosophical question of being itself in the philosophical sense that Heidegger and the phenomenologists investigated in the German term Dasein (literally being there), that means being as a continuous existence, being here, on earth, in life? Du Plooy confirms my emphasis on formulation as both an activity and the condition of life-writing when she notes, “The constructedness of this memoir is therefore an integral part of what it actually is and does. It is not necessary to foreground the artistic process or the metaphoric quality and open-endedness of interpretation because it presents itself as a series of artworks in which relativity of meaning is inherent” (Du Plooy 6).

She furthermore links the organization of the book to the idea of constructedness—as opposed to narration—which becomes another site of purposeful hybridity that produces both interanimation of forms and processes and a creative ambivalence at the level of any semiotic activity:

The content of the photo memoir follows a chronological order but is divided into sections. In one sense, Leonard simply tells her story in a seemingly uncomplicated way. As one works through the book, one becomes aware of the interplay between the two mediums, language and image, of the artistic ambiguities in every image and of the increasing complexity as the artist finds and develops her own style. The earlier and later works are also intratextually linked. (Du Plooy, 6)

Plotting a life of making by the later invention of a text to link the moments of artmaking reveals rhymes and repetitions, recurrences and departures.

5 Moments of Being

Joanne Leonard’s title purposely resonates with feminist writer Virginia Woolf, whose modernist search for a means to capture in words moments of being had been chosen in 2002 by editor Jeanne Schulkind when compiling a collection of scattered autobiographical writings by the modernist writer and essayist—the volume known to Joanne Leonard (Woolf 2002). Moments of Being also sent me sideways into the major philosophical event of the mid-twentieth-century phenomenology and its feminist appropriation by Simone de Beauvoir, who inflected the existentialist concept of living as a project with feminist questioning of gender neutrality⁵ (De Beauvoir 1949, 2009; Daigle 2013). De Beauvoir’s existentialist reply was there is no being, but like, and indeed inspiring, Felman’s emphasis, only a becoming as girls have to negotiate a weave of cultural definitions and proposed destinies for the creature termed woman. This helps me to escape the autobiographical trap of telling a life as if we already knew what it was well enough to narrate it, where that narration retrospectively lays the time of telling over the time of living that becomes narratable only in retrospect. We discover what has been lived perhaps only in this telling, gerund, or trapping, also gerund, of the chaos of the unexpected in the tramlines of Proust’s ‘remembered time’. Yet as Leonard herself declares, any choice of what to tell might be different at another moment, and one writing might efface other possible stories.

The point is that in narrating my own life, I told one story and now this story is more concrete to me than other stories I might have told, or have yet to tell—and sometimes I forget the 10 or more photographs from a situation in which I may have taken several—ones I printed and have shown—that once seemed as important as any in the book, but now the book almost makes me forget about the others. And those are only the printed ones—if I were to go back through my negatives,—well, I might make very different choices—and create a whole new “life’s work” and story. (Joanne Leonard in conversation with the author, June 16, 2022)

The works in Being in Pictures are not photographs from the family album already doing what Julia Hirsch in her book on Family Photographs suggested, namely raising the mundane to the metaphorical (Hirsch 1981). Joanne Leonard’s book revisits her own artworks, how and when they were made, evoking now, in words, the state of the artist’s mind and life-world at the time of making, while also attesting to certain breaks, life-changing events, and the making of independent life-decisions with its compounding of economic and emotional struggles in choosing to be the sole economic support and single parent of a longed-for daughter. The book also explores how this artist from a minority with both an American and a European Jewish heritage came to research Jewish family histories and uncovered institutional antisemitism in nineteenth-century US-America. Finally the book bears artistic witness to the physical destruction and psychological ravages that our ageing bodies and minds can inflict on us and those whom we love and fear to lose by creating a form through which to negotiate not bereavement but the loss of her mother’s being through the onset of self-alienating dementia.

Joanne Leonard’s aesthetic medium was originally analogue photography, a medium that means literally light writing and even has been twinned with life-writing in Timothy Dow Adams’s book subtitled ‘photography in autobiography’, where he concludes, from reading texts using photographs in life-writing, that both autobiography and photography tend to occlude as much as they seek to reveal (Adams 1999). Photographs, like texts, are complex semiotic formulations. Joanne Leonard was sometimes being behind the camera’s viewfinder, but more often looking at her subject by using the double lens reflex camera typically held at waist height (Fig. 1). Later she developed digitally manipulated photography from which she has continuously invented a range of hybrid forms, notably through collage, and latterly including handwritten texts on various transparent or inscribable surfaces (Fig. 3). The leading feminist art critic Lucy Lippard, an early supporter of Leonard’s work since the 1970s, has written about the significance not of hybridity but of collage as the key aesthetic mechanism:

Trying to resolve her conflict between a need to respond to world events and (the) attraction to “intimate family scenes”, Leonard began to make photo-collages, combining her own prints with found material. By the early 1970’s many women artists had arrived at collage as the most expressive and effective vehicle for a feminist esthetic. Although the position of women and women artists has somewhat improved over the past decade, it remains a “collage situation” merely to be a woman in a patriarchal society, reminiscent of the Surrealist definition of collage as a new reality forged from the reconciliation of two distant realities. Collage offers not only a means of knotting together the fragments of women’s multiple roles and offsetting the stark contrasts imposed by heightened political consciousness, but it also provides a way of leaving nothing out. Although the collage esthetic has infinite stylistic possibilities, one of its premises might be said to be that no part is rejected in favor of the whole. It is a medium closer to film and prose than to painting and sculpture, a medium in which art, life and politics can confront each other and intersect. (Lippard 1980)

Collage is, therefore, distinct from hybridity, being an invented medium of relationality and mutual transformation, interanimation perhaps, by constructing poetically the surreal ‘reconciliation of two distant realities’ imagined in André Breton’s definition of surrealism distilled in the words of Uruguayan-born poet Isidore-Lucien Ducasse (1846–1870), known as the Comte de Lautréamont, “[A]s beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table” (de Lautréamont 1920 and Breton 1969).

Being in Pictures is itself a work of collage where Leonard’s later words and original images do different jobs. Texts in the form of titles already accompany her artworks. The cover image for Being in Pictures, for instance, grammatically performs a statement: Romanticism Is Ultimately Fatal (Fig. 5). This work was made in 1972 in a series titled Dreams and Nightmares. Through a domestic window we see a collaged, found book illustration image of an Arthurian knight, carrying off a young woman. Joanne Leonard’s text from 2008 reads: “I’d felt I’d made the work and then titled it Romanticism Is Ultimately Fatal in order to purge sorrow over love lost. Later the women’s movement helped me and other women to understand one of the work’s larger themes—that ‘romance’ is a powerful cover often masking the very bad deal marriage can be, especially for women” (Leonard 2008, 82). Leonard’s text mingles several temporalities. The text locates an original impulse—‘I’d felt’—in the past of the moment of making as “a purging of sorrow”, and then identifies its transformation into feminist understanding of the ideological concept of romance as a cover for the “bad deal” of marriage resulting from the making and titling of the image. This shifts the effect of the image for its maker and its readers from its incitement in personal anguish to later recognition of the shared condition that British feminist Lee Comer’s brilliant feminist study of economic servitude and psycho-sexual abuse exposed in her book Wedlocked Women (Comer 1974) or what Lesbian Marxist feminist Monique Wittig theorized as domestic corvée imposed on women as a class in her “One is not Born a Woman” (1980/1981/1993).

Fig. 5

Joanne Leonard, Romanticism Is Ultimately Fatal, 1972, fine grain positive transparency selectively opaqued over collage, 10 × 12 ins. ©Joanne Leonard and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The found image of the knight re-appears in, and almost concludes, one of Joanne Leonard’s most challenging, and perhaps now her most famous, work, along with her stunning image of a sunlit pregnant woman hanging out her washing (Fig. 6), namely her feminist collage work from 1973 titled Journal of a Miscarriage (Fig. 7a, b, and c). This work was made with 27 pages of a large-sized sketch book where collaged materials, writing, and, in two instances, her own blood create one of the most remarkable and rare artistic engagements with pregnancy loss in the entire history of art. The journal opens in hope with an image of a ripe pear from which spring a pair of girls’ legs, running (Fig. 7a–c).

Fig. 6

Joanne Leonard, Sonia, 1966, silver print, 1966, ©Joanne Leonard and San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art

Fig. 7

(a–c) Joanne Leonard, ‘Pregnant’ and ‘Rupture’ and ‘Untitled: pear, couple and cactus’ from a Journal of a Miscarriage 1973, collage and pencil on sketch book pages, 1 × 14 inches ©Joanne Leonard and Whitney Museum of American Art (Gift of Collection of Jeremy Stone)

The handwritten pencilled word anchors the hybrid combination to many layers of meaning. The pear (a) is not pregnant. Its shape visually evokes the roundness of a full-term belly. The legs belong to a pubescent child, signifying a childish response such as jumping for joy. At the second level of meaning, we might read it as a verbal-visual declaration of a desire to be or a pleasure in being pregnant such as is registered in the longing inscribed in the photographer’s gaze at the Sonia, pregnant hanging out her laundry. This fantasy of the pregnant female body via a verbal-visual pun on projected fruitfulness and bulbous shape is followed, however, by two pages which are marked with stains of blood (b). These smears of uterine bleeding cruelly and brutally index the psychological pain of a woman when her body’s independent revolt against the subject’s will initiates the autonomous shedding of a desired pregnancy. Later these stained pages were collaged with found images from medical textbooks where the subject of desire, a woman longing to be ‘with child’, signified in the pear, is so often reduced to headless genital anatomy (Hunter 1774).⁶ Miscarriage is tragically not uncommon; in fact, spontaneous pregnancy loss occurs in between one and two in every five pregnancies. Medically, it is normal. Psychologically, for each woman, such loss is traumatic, especially when the pregnancy was desired. This destruction of the future that the body wilfully and autonomously performs against the subject’s will devastatingly unlocks, like opening Pandora’s box, a depth of feeling never imagined in areas of the self, hitherto unencountered. In the 1970s, personal accounts of profound psychological suffering occasioned by such pregnancy loss formed a new testimonial feminist literature filling in Woolf’s culturally missing insider accounts of events of the woman’s body.

Leonard’s 1973 Miscarriage Journal is, therefore, a landmark as one of the very few aesthetic inscriptions (Pollock 1996) not of the anatomy but the psychological impact of an event of sexuated body-psyche. A very different, subjectivizing precedent, but unknown to Joanne Leonard at the time of her making the Journal, are the two rare works, a painting and lithograph by twentieth-century Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907–1954), whose two works of mourning counter alienating anatomical drawings to project into visual representation the anticipatory-imaginary relations between subjectivity, desire, and the ungovernable autonomy of the body that can, at times, defeat the inhabiting subject and crush her desire.

The journal is not, however, a representation or writing of an event—except perhaps in the two gestural paintings in blood itself. It is built slowly over time as a series of elaborated semiotic statements involving invented visual formulations through collage that contest both the patriarchally medicalized and the culturally canonical concepts of the subject-less, female reproductive body as site of abstract knowledges and hetero-erotic fantasies. Progressively, the Journal moves beyond the immediacy to create hybrid forms that become a more searching exploration of sexuality, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the doubled sense of the word reproduction in both the realm of desire for a child or its traumatic loss and the process of analogue photographic practice. The pear becomes a recurring trope, the journal circling back to end with the empty outline of the pear within which sits a horizontal pear sprouting painful cacti sheltering or perhaps menacing a photographic vignette of a couple seated upon its now fallen shape. These cacti function as phallic instrument of fruitless sex (Fig. 7c).

Let me go on to 1975, re-encountering a photograph of the window we first met in Romanticism Is Ultimately Fatal of 1973 that has now been domesticated with frilly net curtains (Fig. 8). Inside, not beyond the window, lies a baby in a rocker seemingly gazing in fascination at the spiky world beyond. The scene is now, however, not just the child as a sight captured by the gaze of the photographer. The photograph is the site or locus of the dispassionate photographer’s gaze simultaneous with the mother’s impassioned gazing, mediated by the artist with a camera who makes an exquisite study of light in a compositional challenge. Leonard photographed her daughter Julia constantly in a participatory creative duet requiring and soliciting Julia’s knowing performance for the doubled maternal and artist’s creative gaze. These photographs are of Julia Leonard, but they are about a duet of image-making in life-gazing.

Fig. 8

Joanne Leonard, Julia’s Morning, silver print, 1975 © Joanne Leonard

The artist writes:

A mother who makes hundreds of pictures of her child (as I have) may simply be performing and exaggerating activities of maternal absorption and devotion. There is a popular notion that women’s creativity is ‘natural’, that creative and procreative forces in women are part and parcel of the same womanly instinct. Hence what could have been more ‘natural and motherly’ than the picture-taking mother I had become? But a mother’s act of paying close and frequent attention to her child through photography can be read in many ways, included as devoted and attentive or as horridly intrusive, too objective, and thus cold and exploitative, or even pornographic.⁷ (Leonard, 2008, 142)

Leonard offers reflexive self-analyses of her different subject positions, layering fiction and reality already within the photographic image that is product of a practice, mechanical, chemical, edited, printed, exhibited, accumulating, and aesthetically formulated with histories of the image and the context in mind.

Joanne Leonard’s work is not inward or retrospective but outward, aware of the world in which these ordinary activities of sex, disappointment, loss, love, and work form the daily textures. Her art is not, therefore, documentary. It is knowingly deconstructive with a consciously feminist sense of the political conditions of our most personal experience.

The window theme will take us forward to 1983, the moment of Republican Presidency of Ronald Reagan, through the window of the two works titled Julia in the Window of Vulnerability (1983, Fig. 9). The title indexes the Cold War warrior President Ronald Reagan who increased the stockpile of ballistic missiles in order to close the ‘window of vulnerability’ at a moment when there were enough such missiles to destroy the entire world. The placing of a small thoughtful girlchild in a window in a tiny, fragile house inside a child’s drawing of home and garden, or suspended Wizard of Ozlike in the night sky, or perhaps floating in the space through which the missiles might travel, articulates the conditions of life-making and life-preserving in a world governed by death-dealing power games that Stanley Kubrick so terrifyingly exposed as phallic in his film Dr Strangelove: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb (Hawk Films 1964).

Fig. 9

Joanne Leonard, Julia and the Window of Vulnerability, 1983, silver print and chalk pastel © Joanne Leonard and Collection of René de Rosa

Windows also take us backwards to Joanne Leonard’s chapter titled ‘Night Photography’ which reveals her earlier fascination with images of sleeping people amongst which are her remarkable images of sleeping men, many nude (Fig. 10). These works dramatically challenge the existing tropes of the sleeping female Venus or nymph in Western art.

Fig. 10

Joanne Leonard Death for a Wife from Dreams and Nightmares series, layered works incorporating continuous-tone positive transparencies, selectively opaqued and collage 1972, 10 × 10 ins. © Joanne Leonard and Private Collection

In Leonard’s series under this rubric, there is a simple black and white image of one sleeping man, seen against the luminous window, reflected in the single picture on the wall. Nudity, sleep, and daylight suggest a postcoital moment with the sexual partner now looking back, but with a camera, to capture a spontaneously formed image of hetero-erotic, somnolent masculinity. But then comes a series of the same body in a shifted pose in which window and picture become sites of bitter visual commentary on the darkness that can shatter the idyllic dream, ending in an image with an inserted, found image of a husband shooting his wife. It is titled Death for a Wife and Leonard’s work is called Sad Dreams, Cold Morning. This, the Dreams and Nightmares series of 1972, culminates with Romanticism Is Ultimately Fatal (Fig. 5).

Sleep takes us back to 1971 and to a work titled Of Things Masculine which was printed in a book about images of sexuality (Of Things Masculine, magazine clippings of Biafran War casualties, silver print, Plexiglas layers, 10.5 × 10 ins, ca 1971; Leonard 2008, 62–63). Here the sleeping man is surrounded with a collaged sky of travelling sperm seen under a microscope uniquely representing the generative, reproductive aspects of masculine bodies while collaged newspaper images of the casualties of the Biafran War appear on the bedding. One critic misread the work as a straight woman attempting to make a queer image because of what he recognized as the evident sensuousness of the male nude. That critic ignored the complex framing of an intimate gaze by a woman at her lover transformed by the woman as artist creating a critical reading of the situation by the supplementary juxtaposition of evocations of both life and death, linked here directly with the masculine body even as it is revealed in its both physical potency and human vulnerability in sleep. Many artists have struggled to articulate female heterosexual desire through imaging the male body⁸ (Walters 1978). The tropes often fail because of the unease caused by linking masculine sexuality with passivity or being observed while unconscious. Leonard has charged the scene to allow the intensity of desire betrayed by the cruelty of loveless treatment, as we see somewhat less overtly in another work collaging a self-portrait in the mirror with lover in bed with an erotic etching by Picasso that counter-activates the woman’s agency in encompassing the scene as its subject.

I have spent much of this chapter reading Joanne Leonard’s images, avoiding the critical frames in which, probably, rightly her work has been positioned in relation to life narratives, text and images, and the tendency to read women’s work as inevitably personal and autobiographical in a manner that denies the constructedness of any life-writing. In preparation I spent many hours in virtual dialogue with Joanne Leonard learning more and more about the complexity of her artistic practice and the deeply conceptual, analytical, as well as political framing of her concerns and aesthetic decisions. Yes, the book does introduce its readers to the artist’s American- and German-born Jewish parents, her twin and singleton siblings, her husband and a lover, her daughter, marking the passing of her father and the descent of her elegant, psychoanalyst mother into the nightmare world of loss of memory and hence self. She marks the inevitable shattering when the daughter makes her bid for autonomy as she must with a long piece, Letting Her Go With Difficulty (scroll: laser copy transparency with collage and paint, 20 × 48 ins., 1993).

Memory and time are held in the photographic images. These have been assembled and assigned their role as works of art made in moments of this creative women’s practice of living and making. In effect, the more I conversed with the artist in dialogical research and using a grounded theory analysis of the concepts that the works themselves and her spoken words prompted such as longing, desire, disillusion, determination, agency, political consciousness, and love given, received, resisted, denied, mourned, the more I was forced back to confront the space of work and thought: her artworks themselves and their inception in a revolution in feminist consciousness and its generated cultural community of critique and transformation.

Subjectivity is articulated across a juxtaposition in a double relation by temporal disjuncture. The artist looks back, chooses, assembles images she has made, remembers or re-elaborates what she now remembers or imagines, or projects were the causes or conditions of their making such as the Cold War or 9/11. At the same time, the artist is bringing into being a book that will place her as a voice beside, not “in the pictures”. But the address of the book is to the reader, an unknown, third party, whose journey through the book is not the artist’s as it was lived and is now remembered through the pictures she created. The burden falls on readers to receive the words addressed both to her and to the images suspended on the facing pages, that are not, and must not be, contained by the words. Their structurally designed encounter interanimates Leonard’s project of Being in Pictures.