Artist Zoe Leonard

Photographer Zoe Leonard collaborated with filmmaker Cheryl Dunye to produce the series "The Fae Richards Photo Archive". In this series 29 actors were hired to play characters in a story about a fictional woman named Fae Richards. The photographs show Richard's life and struggles as a young black actress in the early to mid-twentieth-century. Although all the photographs were taken in the mid-nineties, they look torn, stained, and black and white as if they had come from another era. The story of this woman is completely fictionalized, but her character was, of coarse, influenced by women of that time.

From ICP.org/ List of artists...

"January 18 – May 4, 2008
Organized by renowned scholar and ICP Adjunct Curator Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art will present works by leading contemporary artists who use archival documents to rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory, and loss. Over the past thirty years, successive generations have taken wide-ranging approaches to the photographic and filmic archive. The works presented here take many forms, including physical archives arranged by peculiar cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, film versions of photographic albums, and photomontages composed of historical photographs. These images have a wide-ranging subject matter yet are linked by the artists' shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential media of the archive.

Christian Boltanski, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Jef Geys, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Craigie Horsfield, Lamia Joreige, Zoe Leonard, Sherrie Levine, Ilán Lieberman, Glenn Ligon, Robert Morris, Walid Raad, Thomas Ruff, Anri Sala, Fazal Sheikh, Lorna Simpson, Eyal Sivan, Vivan Sundaram, Nomeda and Gediminas Urbona, Andy Warhol."