Mattress, from the series "Analogue" (1998-2009)

In this series, over the course of 11 years, Zoe Leonard documented her changing neighborhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan; gentrification was overtaking mom-and-pop businesses at a quickening pace. Leonard also followed the trail of recycled commercial goods from these businesses to the streets of Mexico, the Middle East, and West Africa, resulting in a kind of travelogue of objects. Her choice of so-called analog tools—a 1940s Rolleiflex camera and chemically processed film, as opposed to the digital technologies then threatening to make them obsolete—is an analogue for the fate of disappearing storefronts in the age of late capitalism and globalization.