Episode 5: Joanne Leonard and Melissa Ann Pinney
In this episode, mixed media artist Joanne Leonard and photographer Melissa Pinney are in conversation with MoCP’s curator of academic programs and collections, Kristin Taylor. Leonard and Pinney discuss works in the MoCP’s permanent collection by Elinor Carucci and Ruth Thorne-Thomsen as well as their thoughts on photographing the lives of their daughters, feminism, and how they navigate depicting both personal and political subjects.
Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, Head with Ladders, Illinois, from the Expeditions series, 1979
Elinor Carucci, Showing My Pregnancy to My Parents, 2004
Interview Transcript
Kristin Taylor:
This is Focal Point, the podcast where we discuss the artists, themes, and processes that define and sometimes disrupt the world of contemporary photography. I'm Kristin Taylor, curator of academic programs and collections at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Today, I'm joined by guests Joanne Leonard and Melissa Ann Pinney.
Joanne Leonard uses collage and mixed media approaches to create candid representations of her life and family members. She has created works over the past four decades on themes of pregnancy, miscarriage, divorce, single parenthood, romance, and self-acceptance. Her works provide a window into her physical and internal life while casting light on the larger absence of feminist narratives in art history.
Melissa Ann Pinney is most recognized for her studies of the social lives and changing identities of American girls and women. After the birth of her daughter in 1995, Melissa photographed everyday moments of her daughter's life, collectively illustrating the larger transformations in female identity.
Joanne and Melissa are both artists who are featured in the museum's permanent collection. And today, we are discussing a work they have each chosen by another artist from the collection, as well as their own work and practice. Melissa and I will start this episode in the museum's vault, looking over the piece that she chose to discuss from our collection. And then we will join Joanne in the WCRX studio, where she will be speaking with us remotely from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Melissa Ann Pinney:
So my name is Melissa Ann Pinney, and I'm here at the MoCP looking at a photograph by Ruth Thorne-Thomsen that she made in 1979. The title is Head with Ladders, Illinois, from the Expeditions series. It's a four by five inch contact print, very warm tone. Ruth made this with a pinhole camera, which is a homemade camera that uses literally a pinhole for a lens. So it's not in sharp focus. It has kind of dreamy quality. And what's in the picture were looking up a hill, a dirt, and stones. At the top of the hill on the horizon on the left are five small, just kind of silhouetted figures, really tiny figures. And in the foreground on the right is a giant head in silhouette. The head is kind of propped up. It looks Egyptian. And there are two small ladders, one from the back of the head on the left and a smaller one to the right of the ear. And there's some dirt kind of going out of focus in the foreground.
Kristin Taylor:
Welcome both of you. And thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. For anyone who's listened to this podcast before, we pair two people in conversation about shared topics in their work and in all episodes prior, the two people already know one another and you two previously did not know or even know of each other. And so I first thought of pairing the both of you together because I think there's some obvious parallels in your work, and then there was some not so obvious parallels.
Formally, your work is quite different. Melissa takes color photographs, usually in a more documentary style, sometimes printing them large scale, perhaps showing the lives of girls and women. And Joanne, most of your photographic images are black and white and you work often in collage, layering images with a mixed-media approach. Yet to me, the connections I think are very inherent. And the first comparison I think is that you both are photographing your immediate family members and your daughters.
Melissa, you photograph your daughter, Emma. And Joanne, you photograph your daughter, Julia. And you both have done it throughout their entire childhoods and all the way up to adulthood. Can you both talk about why you have decided to document the lives of your family members and how you sort of navigated doing that work in a field where it could easily be dismissed as just the work of a mother photographing her child?
Melissa Ann Pinney:
Well, I remember somebody saying to me how he would never dream of photographing his children because somehow it would be some kind of imposition, but I always felt like, how could you not photograph your children? I couldn't imagine not photographing Emma and her growing up because it was so interesting to me for one thing, her development.
Since I had photographed women and girls before Emma was born and I was interested in the construction of female identity and I'd photographed at baby showers and beauty salons and weddings, it was really interesting to see it from the other side of being the mother of a girl and watching how she developed. And also because I'm just always photographing everything that's around me.
Kristin Taylor:
Yeah. It's part of your life.
Melissa Ann Pinney:
Right. It's just part of my life and my work.
Kristin Taylor:
And for you, Joanne?
Joanne Leonard:
Well, it's pretty similar in that, I agree with Melissa, how could you not? They're so captivating. And then this is my only child and I waited a long time. I was 35 when she was born. But I've been photographing my sister's children and other children for a long time. I guess a natural thing for me to take photographs of Julia, although it did seem excessive at times. She was so handy and so intriguing to me.
My mother as a psychologist was an observer of children and child behaviors. So maybe that's another influence. And the other thing is that I'm a twin, so reflecting. My mother says that when I was little, I said to my sisters, “Stand over there so I can see how I look.” I think taking pictures is one way to have a chance to see how it all looks. That's another possibility as an explanation,
Kristin Taylor:
You both also photograph a lot of these sort of everyday moments where mostly you photograph middle school dances or bar mitzvahs or picnics, and now you're photographing within Chicago public schools. And Joanne, you have also photographed a lot of these things that maybe don't seem so significant to a lot of people, like even people sleeping or the objects that you use in your collages are tea cups or spoons or scissors or these kinds of objects around your home. Can you both talk about what you're drawn to in the way that you photograph people and the way that you, I guess, decide where to photograph?
Melissa Ann Pinney:
I was thinking about the last question still a little bit, about what you said about being taken seriously when you're a mother taking pictures of your children and how all the men that took pictures of their wives and children that that was taken seriously and collected and exhibited and considered fine art. And I think it's been harder for women, but I also think that once I photographed Emma and I made a book called Regarding Emma, that was very little of actually of Emma, that everyone perceived all the pictures to be about Emma and everyone perceived all my work all the time to be about Emma, which to me just meant that they weren't looking. Because as Emma got older, the projects swirled out from our little nuclear family to the community; to the church, to the school, to all the sports events. And I felt that it was, I don't know, kind of a sexist perception and also that somehow it would be less important even if that were true.
I think that it's always important to say, the moment that you're photographing may be a small moment, but that doesn't mean that the picture is unimportant. The picture you make of it. I mean, because what did Matisse paint? I mean, lots of people painted, lots of painters painted their everyday lives and their domestic life and objects and ...
Joanne Leonard:
I love your answer, Melissa. That was great. And I think of myself in a way as an autobiographer. So everyday-ness is really the subject of my photographs in many ways, even though I have done some documentary work. It maybe self-centeredly, but I think of it all as a reflection of what I see and experience. So that's a kind of through line in my work.
Melissa Ann Pinney:
Also, I was really trying to show moments and experiences that are hidden because they were considered unimportant, because they were about women and women's experience together instead of being about women in relation to men's experience. So if I was hired to photograph a wedding, to me, the thing that was really intriguing and important for me to photograph was all the women together, getting ready for the wedding. The wedding itself and the bride and groom were just really not as interesting to me as the generations and the friends and the comradery of the women.
Joanne Leonard:
I photographed weddings also more or less as an income, but I love the before the wedding elements and found the ceremony itself much less interesting. Maria Kassab was the only name I could find for a long time of someone who painted women and children. And at the time when I was photographing my sister's children, I didn't have a child yet. So I felt very akin to her because I also learned that she didn't have children. It was her sister's children that she was painting. But I really looked for examples that I could find through my interest in art history, and she was rather alone among those. The possibility of something that matched a little bit of my own sensibility.
Melissa Ann Pinney:
Right.
Kristin Taylor:
I love that you're both starting to touch upon this core component in your work of your deeply feminist viewpoint. Melissa, I'm fortunate enough to regularly see you around the museum, at our exhibition openings, or when you bring your classes in for tours. And you told me once in conversation that that's often missed in your work, that it comes from this point of view and that you have a deep feminist message with your work. And Joanne, yours is a little bit more outright discussed I think, and in your book, being in pictures at least, where you pair a lot of your images and talk about the aspect of feminism in your work. Can you both talk about how feminism works its way into your work or what it means to you on an artistic level?
Joanne Leonard:
Well, I think of feminism as a perspective or even a habit of looking for what's been left out, and that includes the perspective of women. So I think that's ... Rather than a written investigation of what is feminist, I try to demonstrate it through just my own perspective and also in my teaching, in making sure that there are examples of work by women or the perspective of women, which is really harder to find even today.
In the New Yorker, the new article about the new Museum of Modern Art, their critic sheet all decides to write an article about how wonderfully new the masterpieces that have always been there, but became a kind of too familiar, now are reposition so they look so wonderful and can be even more masterpiece-y, but that doesn't really suggest the importance of the new hanging, which I expect to really embrace, that's supposed to include many more people of color and non-European image makers and women. So that's a sort of my feminism is being alert and making a critique almost always of what's going on and what's left out, including women.
Melissa Ann Pinney:
Well, I think it's so integral to the way I see things. It's not like it works its way into the work. It's absolutely central. You know, that the idea that women and girls are important, that they are the subject, that they're not an auxiliary experience, and that we haven't seen it. Like, if you think about movies, we still don't see it. I think it's always been in literature, the women that have been published, but we still don't see it. Talking about MoMA, there was a art news poll that was just released that 11% of museum acquisitions are by women, just infuriating. And you think about how you might take that personally, “Well, my work hasn't been collected or somebody else, some other woman hasn't been collected.” But then you realize, “Oh, it's not personal, it's systemic of course.” But I think it is about seeing what's been overlooked about what hasn't been taken seriously or really put center stage.
Kristin Taylor:
Joanne, can you tell us about the piece that you chose to discuss from our collection today?
Joanne Leonard:
I chose a photograph that I seen a bit somewhat remarkable and also had a touchstone with some things that I've done in my work as well. It's Elinor Carucci's photograph called Showing My Pregnancy to My Parents. Something I never did, not in the way that she did, but I have a photograph of a pregnant woman and some work about miscarriage. So the subject of women's reproductive lives is part of my work.
This photograph by Elinor, just to describe it, has three people framed by two windows. Elinor is standing in front of a window so that her profile as a very pregnant woman, nude is beautifully outlined by bright light behind her. And her parents stand at some distance by another window. Her father with his hands on his hips and almost a kind of angry or what the heck is going on sort of posture. And her mother joins her in near nudity and that she's wearing a slip, unlike her husband. He's fully dressed, ready for the street, but the mother is in her slip. And they're both looking at their daughter with reserve puzzlement. No, they're not racing towards her saying, “How wonderful, you're pregnant.”
So it's a very charged moment, a very handsome photograph. A touchstone with Melissa's that it's in color, it's staged and sort of anti or contra natural. There's nothing spontaneous. So one has really think, what did the photographer mean to say and do with this photograph?
Kristin Taylor:
And yeah, Joanne, I should add that I first learned about your work when you sent us your book being in pictures to the museum. And I was shocked that I had never seen your work before, because there are so little work made about pregnancy and miscarriage and birth and the whole, like you said, reproductive life of women that is such a giant part of all of our lives. We're all born to a woman and you hardly ever see work on birth. So that's a whole other thing that I could talk about for hours, but we have a piece by you in our collection from a series you had called Keeping my Hand In, where it shows an actual birth and the child coming out of the woman's body. And that is the first image in our collection that shows birth. We may have 16,000 photographs. So that was really remarkable and special to me when we finally acquired that. And I hope that it's the start of many more.
But let's shift over to Melissa's choice because you chose a piece by Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, which I thought was not such a conventional choice for you. So I'm excited to hear why you chose this piece.
Melissa Ann Pinney:
I knew Ruth when she was making these pictures. It's a series called The Expedition series. And like I said earlier, it's a four by five contact print from a homemade camera. So it has a very kind of dreamy quality. And there's also this strange juxtaposition of scale, tiny, tiny little figures on a hilltop and a huge kind of severed head in the lower right. So what I love about this whole series and especially this picture is the way Ruth has the sense of mystery in her pictures. They're not Photoshopped, these are from the late ‘70s and ‘80s. So they're all real ... They're objects that are really in front of the camera. I think that some of them are cutouts. I'm not even sure exactly how she did it. And some, she achieves through scale and the use of this particular camera, but they're realistic looking events that have this incredible sense of mystery.
And the other thing about, Ruth was a really charismatic teacher. She taught at Columbia for years, and I did an independent study with her. But I remember when she took these little images that are about even smaller than four by five inches and made these huge prints. At the time, they seemed enormous. I think they were probably 40 inches or so. And how that changed the image to see it be enormous like that and how groundbreaking it was, at least for me at the time. And I think what intrigues me about working as a photographer is being able to photograph real life. You know, out on the street or in the schools where I am now and have the pictures have a sense of and unanswered questions and things that don't look every day or real necessarily, but they are because they're not Photoshopped, they're not collaged. And to me, that speaks to the mystery of life. And so that's why I chose Ruth's picture.
Kristin Taylor:
That's great. Melissa, you have a photograph that you made that really sticks in my mind of where it's demonstrating some of these expectations of beauty in girls. And it's a photograph of two young girls posing with a model of Barbie or an actress playing Barbie within a target store. And what is so strange to me about it is that they're posing for the camera, but you're photographing them posing and the person taking the picture is left out of the frame of your picture. So they have sort of the stiff body language, and the Barbie actress is wearing this very pink, fluffy dress and she has this sort of really pale skin and the girls are both people of color. And so there's sort of that contrast too in sort of their realities. And I think that in that picture, there's so much, there's so much story.
And then Joanne, you also have in your book, a spread where you talk about the expectations of beauty and when you were 10 years old, you wrote your mother a letter talking about already being worried that you were getting fatter. And then you pair up with photographs of girls having their pictures taken by another photographer.
So both of you, I think play with these sort of that feeling of what you're supposed to be and how beautiful you're supposed to be. And that's my very long-winded way of asking you a question in what do you hope that your audience gains from looking at your work? How do you hope people will grow in letting go of some of these expectations of beauty?
Melissa Ann Pinney:
Well, that particular picture is called The Real Live Barbie at Target, and she wasn't a model or an actress. I mean, she was really ... Well, I mean, she was hired, but as far as perfection goes, she was not perfect. You could see her roots and her teeth weren't good, but she was blonde and she was in a princess dress. And it was a promotion for Barbie merchandise, so there was this huge line of girls with their arms full of Barbie merchandise, waiting to get up to the table so that the real live Barbie could sign her headshot, which was actually a picture of a doll and have their picture taken with Barbie.
So they were sisters, I think African-American girls, one older, one younger. And I had recently read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. So I was thinking about, what does it feel like to be an African-American girl here at this event where all the dolls are white, there wasn't an African-American doll? And in fact, behind them, behind the table where the Barbie is signing her autograph, it was a wall of white Barbie dolls. So white girls and women can't meet the standards of beauty, which are impossible, and mostly now Photoshopped. But what if you are a girl or a woman of color where the standards just don't apply, how does that feel? I don't know if all that can come through in the picture, but that was certainly what I was thinking about.
Kristin Taylor:
And Joanne, do you have thoughts on this sort of unrealistic expectation of beauty that you touched upon in your book?
Joanne Leonard:
I do. I don't know exactly how my photographs address that. Maybe I can bring in ... Since collage came up in the last kind of from Melissa's point of view, my idea has been, and this might be useful to the idea of ideal beauty, to add on or layer on to the every day something contradictory that comes from the media. So from the newspaper or a magazine or a book on art. So I'm combining things to create a commentary. Not always about beauty, but because I recognize that my photographs came so much from an everyday home place and didn't reflect that I'm responsive to images out in the world and journalism and commentary that I used the aspect of layering that collage provides to create that possibility of commentary. I don't know if that works for you as an answer to your question.
Kristin Taylor:
Yeah.
Melissa Ann Pinney:
Well, I love your work, Joanne, and collage is really hard. I've tried it. It's really hard. You think it's going to be easy and it really isn't easy.
Joanne Leonard:
Appreciate you're saying that. I appreciate you're saying that. I found it very difficult to teach collage to students because there is something somehow not easy about it, but hard to name.
Melissa Ann Pinney:
Yeah. I don't know what it is. Well, first of all, it's hard for me to cut up a photograph. I mean, it's really almost impossible for me to do that, but I didn't mean to imply anything negative about that. For me, it's a different kind of game. Like, how can I make a picture with what's presented to me? You know, with whatever I walk into. And that's really hard in a whole different kind of way.
Joanne Leonard:
I understand. And I see it as a limitation. I admire so many photographs of photographers to go more out in the world to make their photographs. And so the Vietnam war and starvation in Biafra, the things that I can remember from the ‘60s and ‘70s were so graphically distressing, so utterly the opposite of the beauty and intimacy of the things I most like to photograph. So the making collages began as a way to do just what Melissa said is, you know, difficult, like cut up a photograph to create tears and fissures in my own photographs in order to insert these other visions that I wasn't going toward with my camera, but existed in the realm of imagery. So bringing those two things together.
Kristin Taylor:
You just touched upon some thing that I wanted to get to also, which is teaching. You said it's difficult or hard to teach your students how to do collage. And I understand it's probably also difficult for you both, you both teach, to be artists and teach and to make time for that because teaching seems like such a time-intensive work. I was hoping both of you could talk about the role of teaching in your lives or what value you gained from teaching and working with students.
Melissa Ann Pinney:
I'm only a part-time teacher. So I teach-
Kristin Taylor:
I counts.
Melissa Ann Pinney:
It does count, but I mean, it doesn't take up as much time. And that's partly, when I got married and had Emma, I was 42 and my husband traveled all week. So he was gone all the time. And for me to have been teaching full time, I would have had to have somebody at home full-time taking care of Emma. And I felt like, no, I want to be the one. You know, why would I do that? So I've taught one class a semester. Well, and even before I had Emma, I only taught part-time because there weren't any positions open at the time. Columbia had 10 teachers and nine of them were male. That was the full-time tenured faculty. So I really love to teach part-time. I can't imagine full-time and doing my work. And especially when I had a child at home.
Emma's 24 now, so she's been gone a long time, but it's important to me and teaching has always been important for the students to see, to have their own experience mirrored. So that means women, especially in the last few years, maybe five years, I think most of my classes have been like 80% women. And if we go down to the print study room and only see work by white men and the students are Latinx and female, I want to make sure that they see work, that they know that photographers like them are working, that artists like them are working. I think it's really important. And it's hard because it's harder to find that work.
Joanne Leonard:
Well, that was a great answer. My situation is really awfully different, because I've been a single mom the entire time my daughter was growing up. I chose to be a single mom. So selfishly I had her, but no other support. And so teaching was a great way for me to have a living in the Bay Area where I lived at the time she was born. I was teaching in three different campuses to make it work. I taught at Mills and Cal State Hayward Art Institute in San Francisco. So when I got hired at the University of Michigan, it was marvelous to have just one job. And daycare was a constant problem of finding ways to take care of Julia. And there were many years where the only time I could make new work ... If I had started a series, I found I could sometimes continue, but to make new work, it would be in the summer, the very short summer.
So I was often very crabby. I wasn't the best mom in the world. Somehow it never became unimportant to do my own work. But I had had a mother who was a psychotherapist who worked most of my childhood. So it was partly a model and partly a choice I may have made because I didn't want to just be an ordinary mom. Some awful idea I had about that. So we make the choices, we create the world that we want in some ways. And it wasn't just a horrible thing that happened to me that I became a single mom. It was a purposeful thing. So sometimes when I was terribly unhappy and overworked and all, my sister would remind me that I chose these things, that it wasn't someone else's fault. And so there we are.
Melissa Ann Pinney:
I remember the day I brought Emma, we brought Emma home from the hospital, making pictures because I felt like if I stop, I'll never get it back. Because I knew people that stopped when they had children or got a full-time job and some other ... You know, not making their own work and eventually their own work takes a back seat and then it's gone. So I think it's really important.
Joanne Leonard:
Melissa's so right. People say to you all the time, “And I used to take photographs, I used to be a photographer, but then, you know, I had three kids.” Or whatever. And so definitely one has to want to an awful lot in order to keep going once you have kids.
Kristin Taylor:
Yeah, absolutely. And Joanne, you wrote a very great essay about that. I loved that essay as a mother myself with smaller children right now, thinking about making it all work and finding time for everything. So your essay was called Photography, Feminism, and the Good Enough Mother. And it was published in a book called The Familial Case that I had not heard of until I was doing a lot of research on you. But I loved that you are very honest about talking about balancing it all and feeling guilty in some ways for wanting time alone to make your work, and also feeling like your daughter needs you. And that it's kind of this constant balancing act. With everything we're talking about today, you don't usually hear men talk about these things, that it is kind of a burden placed on mothers and also creative mothers in particular.
So I'm just really happy to have you both in conversation. And that's again, another connection I saw between the two of you. And being in a museum, it's something that I can work on, is trying to build up our collection more with women and people who are underrepresented in our collection. So I'm taking everything you're saying to heart and making sure that our students see more work like yours and more work by women.
As we close up, I wanted to ask you both what you're working on now, because you both are, I think, very, very active artists, or at least it seems so. What kind of projects are you working on and what can we expect to see from you down the road?
Joanne Leonard:
I have a series that I've been working on since about 2006, so a little over, what is that? My math is terrible, a long time. Using photographs that I find in the newspaper and bringing them to the surface of an open book. And then I stand above that and photographs, so it's an open book with a juxtaposition of an image from the newspaper and a very parallel image from art history or really a book about anything. I love parallels and analogy, so that's something that I can do all the time. And I'm collecting photographs all the time, and then enjoying the research in the library to find the parallel images. I started with books from my own library, but expanded to going out and looking for the parallels when I didn't find them among my own books.
Melissa Ann Pinney:
I love those pictures, Joanne, I saw a few online.
Joanne Leonard:
Thank you.
Melissa Ann Pinney:
You know, those comparisons over time. As Kristin said earlier, I've been photographing in the Chicago public schools, which is this rare and great privilege to be allowed in. That came about because I'm working with a foundation called CPS Lives, started by Suzette Bross here in Chicago. So the first year I was at the Bell School. It has a thousand kids. It was kindergarten through eighth grade; deaf, gifted, and a neighborhood program. And then the past ... Well, this school year and the end of last school year, I've been in the Ogden International Schools, which are, as you know, if you're in Chicago, that public schools are really segregated and Ogden Schools, Ogden merged with Jenner, so it was this very hopeful experiment in desegregation.
There's a lower school, a middle school and a high school. And I'm at the high school this semester. And I think we were talking earlier about perceptions of our work and how if you're a woman photographing your children, there's a certain perception of what you do and what you're capable of doing. I remember, I don't know, it's probably eight years ago somebody was talking about getting together photographers who photographed in Chicago and they said, “Well, but you don't photograph in Chicago, you live in the suburbs.” And I thought, “Have you seen, you know, the first 30 years of my work?” You know, which was all in Chicago.
So what I love about this project is that I'm photographing girls and boys and now adolescents. So people who have a perception that I never photographed boys or men, now there are lots of boys in the pictures. And I think it's important to somehow fight against those. I think every artist and photographer, if you get known for one thing, that that's sort of the perception that you can't do anything else. So I like that, being able to expand my work that way.
Kristin Taylor:
I am so excited to see what you both do in the future, and I'm really grateful that you both agreed to be here today. So thank you so much for joining us today. And I'm excited too, to see more of your work in the future. All right.
Melissa Ann Pinney:
Thank you.
Kristin Taylor:
Thank you so much.
Melissa Ann Pinney:
Thank you, Joanne.
Joanne Leonard:
Great to meet you, Melissa. Thank you, Kristin.
Kristin Taylor:
Thank you for listening to Focal Point. Focal Point is presented by Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago in partnership with WCRX FM radio. Special thanks to Matt Cunningham, Leslie Reno, Sam White, and Mike Wood at the University of Michigan. Music is by [CB 00:34:01]. To see the images we discussed today, please visit mocp.org\focalpoint. You can also follow the Museum of Contemporary Photography on Facebook and Instagram, @mocpchi and on Twitter, @mocp_Chicago. If you enjoyed our show, please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to Focal Point anywhere you get your podcast.
