Joanne Leonard Featured in The Guardian's "My Best Shot"
Distinguished University Professor Emerita Joanne Leonard is featured in The Guardian’s “My Best Shot” column, where she speaks about her 1971 photograph Another Morning.
It is not an accident that the image here, Another Morning, suggests intimacy; I was in a state of longing for just such intimacy when I made the photograph. Yet the figure was not someone I knew well. She was a guest in a house where I had lived only briefly in West Oakland, California. I’d come to live there after the abrupt collapse of my marriage. I noticed the beautiful light that flowed from a window and touched the sleeper covered only by a white sheet. I captured the moment, and it came to join several photographs I had made over the years of sleeping figures, of my daughter, my sister, my husband sleeping in our hotel room in Merida, Mexico – even sleeping dogs, with limbs entwined. I work towards an idea across a number of images, often over several years.
…I am always delighted when an image reads with some of the intimacy of feelings that I wanted it to carry. But I didn’t have a complicated idea when I made this photograph – I was following my objective of recording things that were close to me.
Joanne Leonard: Vintage Photographs and Early Collages is on view at Hackelbury Fine Art in London through July 8; On June 6, she’ll be in conversation with art historian Griselda Pollock and curator Fiona Rodgers as part of London Gallery Weekend.