Zoe Leonard at the Hispanic Society of America

Zoe Leonard's two-part exhibition for the Dia Foundation at the Hispanic Society of America, Derrotero, consists of her original photography and selections from the society's extensive map collection. For the past decade, Leonard has chronicled the changing retail landscape of the Lower East Side and other neighborhoods in New York and abroad as the mom-and-pops move out and the Gaps and American Apparels move in. The 400 or so photos are arranged in thematic groups --- several shots of signs, for example, followed by pictures of ad hoc bazaars or hanging shirts, and so on. There's no indication of location or time period, just grids following grids.

The second part is where the concept of "derrotero," a Spanish word meant to convey subjective representations of experience, comes into play. The maps date from the fifteenth century, and they're full of tiny details and images. (On a side note, the two halves of the exhibit are displayed not just separately, but in entirely different buildings. Were it not for a very nice security guard, we would have missed the map part altogether.)



Certainly Leonard wants us to link the subjectivity of the photographer's eye with that of the cartographer or diarist. Today we obviously traffic in much different media from explorers of earlier eras, but the desire to order, chronicle, and define our sense of location in space remains the same. A photo, a map, a journal entry, even a tweet --- each is a way of saying, I was here, I saw, I felt, I experienced. Each asserts the supremacy of the I in a world that, generally speaking, couldn't care less.