Joanne Leonard is an American photographer who produced many collages surrounding the topic of motherhood and inter-family generations. One of three sisters, and a single mother to a daughter, Leonard’s familial ties to femininity are strong. In Not Losing Her Memory, a collage series completed in the early 1990s, Leonard compiled photographs, anecdotes, and documents together in a visual exploration of her mother’s decline due to Alzheimer’s disease. Throughout these works is woven a sense of generational inheritance among the women of her family, of both physical attributes and collective memories.
In Day Care Documents, Leonard compiles documents from three generations of her family. Her grandmother’s and mother’s baby book pages are present, interwoven with notes on their infancy, transcribed by Leonard’s hand. In the center of the image, Leonard’s grandmother poses with her baby mother; Leonard’s mother poses with herself and her twin sister, Eleanor (Elly); and Leonard has included her own still with her daughter, Julia. Between these collected images there’s a tender sense of care within these documents, so lovingly preserved over the years, and yet their edges are clipped and overlap. Details from each woman disappear, only to be paralleled by the next generation.
Throughout the series, composed of several larger collages and the smaller Frieze works, Leonard reckons with her mother’s slow disappearance. Images of herself, Elly, their younger sister Barbara, their maternal grandmother, and Julia appear frequently throughout the collages, but the mother’s presence does not join them. The words dancing throughout the series are frequently of stories Leonard’s mother used to tell, which have begun to fade from her mind.
The tight, handwritten cursive of Leonard’s hand preserves these memories, but their directional slant and the cramped loops of the letters make the writing illegible in places. Although the memory still exists, captured on these patchwork recollections, it is distorted in places beyond repair. Only those most familiar with Leonard’s hand could decipher all of the words.
Another motif running throughout the series are the words “allergies, twinning, uterine fibroids,” a reference to a list of female hereditary traits in Leonard’s family that a physician once identified. Within the fear and pain of losing her mother, Leonard and the women of her family are also confronted with the grim fact that her illness may also be hereditary, and her present condition is their future.
“There is a family history of allergies, twinning, prematurely gray hair, uterine fibroids… and artistic talent.”
Leonard’s choice to make these works out of collage is notable because of the destruction inherent in the process of creation. In other series throughout her career, she experimented with other forms of collage, producing unique, ethereal images through the layering of negatives. In other works, exploring her own motherhood and the grief of mothers in warzones, she achieved a heightened drama by mounting images to wooden triptychs, producing a quasi-religious appearance.
In these paper works, the element of collage is instead reminiscent of a scrapbook, a document lovingly and tenderly produced as a family history. Each portion of the series includes personal documents and words that have been collected in one precious, but faulty, container. In creating each page, Leonard has cut, destroyed, or minced other photographs in favor of preserving a single element.
“Absence and loss are all but unrepresentable through traditional photography since photography inherently depends on presence.”
“We tell ourselves stories of our past, make fictions or stories of it, and these narratives become the past, the only part of our lives that is not submerged. Carolyn Hellbron.”