Zoe Leonard Holds Her Camera Like a Weapon

From the link between the word ‘avant-garde’ and French military reconnaissance troops, to the maturation of the medium of photography on US Civil War (1861–65) battlefields, the historical connections between warfare and art-making are legion. Across her four-decade practice, Zoe Leonard has tended to focus on violences that take place far away from the front line, often zeroing in on artefacts and the implications of their display and decay. Yet in her latest solo exhibition, simply titled ‘Display’, Leonard puts a wartime technology front and centre: the suit of armour.

Leonard’s show is austere – if not bleak, then bare in a way that forces viewers to attend to the artist’s subtler formal choices, which are numerous. The exhibition consists only of a handful of gelatin silver prints – six in total, constituting five distinct works – shot between 1990 and 1994 and freshly printed in 2025. Rather than debut these works in an institutional setting or blue-chip gallery (Leonard is represented by Hauser & Wirth in New York), the artist elected to stage the series in Maxwell Graham’s intimate Lower East Side space. Hung throughout the single gallery with large swathes of negative space between them, the photographs portray museum vitrines containing standing suits of armour (a Hellenistic breastplate, Display IX, 1994/2025, is the lone exception). In their focus and cropping, these pictures call to mind some of Leonard’s famous photographs from the 1990s: depictions of anatomical wax models at European medical museums (such as Wax Anatomical Model with Pretty Face, 1990), or an imposing chastity belt displayed alongside an identifying placard (Chastity Belt, 1990/93).

As with other installations, the artist leaves this series unframed, tightly pinned to the wall under thin glass. The reduced decoration extends to the print’s surface, which blackens along the plate edge, exposing the emulsion and its development. No mat, no frame, no label, no ornament. Such austerity is the formal antithesis to her subject matter: the armour with its sumptuous detail and self-conscious defensiveness, those glaring rondels. There’s a contradiction inherent to the series, for each image displays simultaneously a war trophy – polished steel with cocked arms at attention – and weakness, the thick armour obscuring the now absent figure, his necessarily fragile human body. We look through the vacant spaces where their codpieces should be, crotchless and desexed: a rhyme back, possibly, to Leonard’s installation at Documenta IX (1992), where the artist placed black and white shots of vulvas amid the Old Master paintings of Kassel’s Neue Galerie (a critique of another desexed sexuality). Here, however, such absences disclose the vulnerability of the wearer, a reminder that these suits of armour were never quite in the vanguard. Rather, they were merely the embellished reaction of an arrière-garde ill-suited to endure a sea change in modern warfare: the development of gunpowder technology in Europe. Plate armour was abandoned, in part, not because steel failed but because human beings faltered: the body’s frame was simply too frail to bear the hardened platework necessary for survival.

Perhaps today we are suffering a similar fate, crushed by our own defensive measures in a time of silenced speech and hyper-surveilled borders, hardened everywhere from our personal infrastructure (against climate change, for instance, or cybercrime) to our hearts (against almost everything else). Still, Leonard leaves us some hope in the form of a stack of postcards (reminiscent of her carousel rack, For Which It Stands, 2003) resting by the show’s exit. On this card, which might be mistaken for mere gallery ephemera, Leonard’s body appears for the first time in the show. Her outline is reflected in the glass of another case, her silhouette superimposed over two suits of armour. She holds her camera like a witness. She holds it like a weapon.

Zoe Leonard’s ‘Display’ is on view at Maxwell Graham, New York until 25 October

^{Main image: Zoe Leonard, ‘Display’, 2025. Courtesy: the artist and Maxwell Graham, New York}