January 18–May 4, 2008

 

Z O E   L E O N A R D   b. New York, 1961

Appropriation and parody are key devices in many uses of the archive. Here, it is important to foreground the operative logic of these projects and the ethnographic methods underlying them. Zoe Leonard's The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1993–96) draws from a radically different methodological process, namely through the combination of object, story, and parodic invocation of the archive as the space of lost or forgotten stories. The Fae Richards Photo Archive imagines the existence of such an archive of lost stories moldering in trunk boxes in damp basements. Leonard, in collaboration with filmmaker Cheryl Dunye, stages an archival ruse through scripting, casting, staging, and performing the life of an imaginary black Hollywood actress and blues singer Fae Richards (née Richardson), whose accomplishments have supposedly disappeared into the pit of American cultural amnesia, no doubt because of her blackness. In the seventy-eight images that comprise this work, we follow Richards’s carefully annotated story from the earliest images of her as a teenager in Philadelphia in the early 1920s, to her heyday as a screen ingenue in the 1930s and '40s, to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, to the final image of her as an older woman in 1973. Costume, styling, lighting, photographic mood, and the studios where the images were supposedly photographed are designed to correspond to the period being referenced, that is to say, to the archive's specific ethnographic climate. Period authenticity is further augmented by giving the resulting photographs a treatment of patina—intentionally aged, ripped and serrated at the corners, cracked, or sepia-toned with a hint of solarization. These strategies are intended to enhance the believability of the overall work but, contradictorily, they highlight its produced nature, not least because Leonard shows viewers the casting list of the characters.

 

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