Interanimation in Joanne Leonard’s Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir (2008)

US-American artist Joanne Leonard’s book Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir generates a life-grounded sequencing of the photographic images she has created, each series marking the different temporalities of one woman’s life in its multiple voices. Images are juxtaposed to the artist’s reflective text on the political-subjective moments from which the images emerged, locating both her work and her retrospective writing in their changing conditions of existence shaped by place, class, gender, sexuality, desire, loss, and mourning. Pollock explores Leonard’s hybridity as interanimation with both memoir-writing by women and feminist theories of women’s autobiography as structurally ‘missing’ in a phallocentric culture, becoming a story only in a covenant of reading by other women that effectively ‘differences’ the genre of life-writing itself.