It's strangely soothing to watch Zoe Leonard's gallery-size camera obscura, projecting onto the wall and ceiling of the darkened space a silent, inverted view of the outside traffic and scudding clouds above the Finchley Road. That the camera obscura is a pre-photographic device is fitting for Leonard, whose images and installations are very much about documenting the world through strictly old-fashioned, analogue photographic techniques.
Leonard was nominated for the Deutsche Börse photography prize in 2010 for her project 'Analogue' (1998-2007), for which she took hundreds of images of the fronts of small stores around her New York neighbourhood. But this solo show, in all three of Camden's galleries, is a more minimal display.
Along with the camera obscura, Leonard presents 10 black-and-white photographs taken by pointing a camera directly at the sun. The results show the sun as an indistinct fuzzy-edged white centre against a light grey background. The only details are white blobs on the print, which could just as easily be imperfections in the printing process as sun spots or solar flares. As an installation they look beautiful in the bright, white gallery but as individual images they quickly fade from memory.
The third work is an installation of found images, over 6,000 old colour postcards of Niagara Falls, shown from different viewpoints. The cards are stacked in piles of varying heights on a trestle table. Leonard has displayed these before as a wall work, perhaps a better arrangement than here, to demonstrate an important point – that any image is only ever one view out of an infinite number of possible views of its subject.