Analogue: On Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean

“Analogue: On Tacita Dean and Zoe Leonard” draws on surrealist conceptions of automatism and chance. It engages with current debates concerning artistic agency and automatism that hinge on the difference between digital and analogue photographic processes. The debate is joined in this paper through the work of two artists who attach great value to the analogue medium. Both Leonard and Dean are resistant to the inexorable rise of digital photographic technologies and the corresponding near obsolescence of the analogue. In response, they are concerned to make salient the virtues or specific character of analogue film such as its indexicality and openness to chance—characteristics the full significance of which may only have become apparent under pressure of digitalization. Drawing on Eric Santner’s account of the concept of “exposure,” Iversen draws attention to a kind of photographic art practice that is marked by contingency and seared by reality.