Conversation Series Fall 2025 Sofa Issues
On Family, Feedback Machines, and the Anxiety of the Image
Sarah Blesener in conversation with Leigh Ledare
“The presence of the camera is really important. It plays all these different roles, right? It’s a stage, it’s a mirror, it’s a mother, it’s also a judge. It’s a panopticon. It’s a drug – it’s also a tool that’s used to castrate. It’s also something like a priest that allows a confession.” – Leigh Ledare
Last year, I came across a flyer for a workshop at Leigh Ledare’s studio in the Bronx. The first line read, “The process of making what we might call ‘invested’ work cannot take place in a vacuum.”
At the time, all I knew of Leigh sounded like rumor: that he’d once maybe skateboarded professionally, that he might have lived with Larry Clark, that he may or may not be close to Nan Goldin, and that there existed lots of unsettling images of his mother. All lore to the side: I remember meeting Leigh, sharing with him my woes, and a mess of images and notes. He didn’t flinch. Over the next year, a small group of us gathered monthly at his studio to show unfinished work.
Leigh often spoke about how, in families, authorship is collective – that each member contributes, consciously or not, to a shared mythology that keeps evolving. He encouraged us to look at the ways agency shifts within that system, to see how every gesture or refusal reshapes the narrative over time. Meeting Leigh helped me recognize how those narratives, and the roles we inhabit within them, might be holding us in place, and how shifting our relationship to them could open up whole new ways of seeing.
Leigh’s film The Task is less a film about a group than an experiment in what happens when the act of watching becomes the very thing under study. Over three days in Chicago, twenty-eight strangers, ten psychoanalysts, and a team of camera operators gathered to enact a Tavistock-style Group Relations Conference: a temporary institution designed to study itself. In this setup, the usual distance between observer and participant collapses: the analysts observe, the cameras observe, and everyone is forced to contend with their own role in the system. What unfolds is not therapy, exactly, but a collective inquiry into perception, power, and complicity. As the group turns its attention to its own dynamics, and to the cameras that encircle them, the film becomes an evolving system studying itself, a portrait of consciousness under observation.
In this conversation, we spoke about The Task, the ethics of implication, the trapdoor of visibility, the grave as a conceptual art piece with a gift tag, and all the unspoken hauntings we drag with us. Before signing off, Leigh added, “let’s keep talking about how to not get pinned down—how to move laterally out of expectations.”
Sarah Blesener: Leigh. Can we discuss what the hell happened in The Task?
Leigh Ledare: It’s important to parse the method because it is a sort of intervention into Tavistock group relations, a movement that began in the 1940s in the UK. What this group developed into was a sort of systems-based group psychoanalysis with three to five day immersive conferences: the goal of it was to enact a temporary institution whose purpose is to study itself, a kind of feedback machine that brings to the fore neurosis within the group.
What I ended up doing for The Task was making an intervention into that method. I hired a group of 6 camera operators and 10 analysts trained in the method, and they led 28 participants, across-section of people from Chicago, through a series of small and large groups over the course of three immersive days – the task being to examine one’s own behavior in the here and now.
The typical doctor/patient relationship is recast here to be something along the lines of worker and management, so there’s an inherent kind of balance of authority the work is organized around. And this is a reflection on the institution. It brings up these questions of haves and have-nots, grievances, and authority (who’s authorized to speak to what and who isn’t?) play out along both identity and power lines.
One of the things that happened in the film was that there were two institutions placed in conflict with each other. There was the institution of their therapy method and the model of a feedback machine around institutional life. And then there was also the institution of aesthetics – the idea of the film.
Of course, it raised questions and anxieties around privacy. What happens in the here and now, and what gets to stay in the here and now? In other words, what does it mean to actually create a representation of all of this? And there’s an issue that was raised in the middle of this – what does one actually consent to when it’s unknown what will unfold? What can one consent to?
I don’t simply want to document a conference. What I want to do instead is to create a conference with cameras, where the cameras and the camera operators and myself, as the director of this film, are actually part of the conference. It was a way of incorporating the issue of the mediated nature of subjectivity and the question of control in our society, and raising the question of how we’re always being watched and the voyeurism that culture contains today.
“How do you construct a space where things can be spoken about that you know are present but might not be able to see directly? How do we work with the tension of the prohibition of what can be spoken about or not? And this is where it gets interesting – art being this permission, giving a structure to reflect on things that might make us uneasy, but which, if we don’t attend to, if we don’t perform a proper burial, so to say, we drag them forward throughout our life.”
Sarah Blesener: I mean, I was even surprised with some of the topics that people brought up. It was…deeply uncomfortable as a viewer. I’m wondering if you could talk about how you use abjection, and what that lens opens up for you in spaces like these.
Leigh Ledare: Well, it’s not transgression for transgression’s sake, even though it does poke at things that aren’t being addressed or looked at. But it’s more so to create space so that the permission to think about them can come forward. That’s what a lot of art has done. And I think it’s important to say… counter to a moral impulse to keep one’s hands clean and pretend that we don’t participate in this, or to act as if we don’t have unconscious baggage or unconscious hostility that we bring into situations – this work has tried to really acknowledge where we’re implicated, you know?
Sarah Blesener: Yeah. Can you say more about this idea of implication? What draws you to that in your work?
Leigh Ledare: I think it is a way to get into the depths of certain things. If you don’t implicate yourself, you’re pretending that you’re sort of staying clean from it all. It’s a distancing, right? It’s a way of repressing your own involvement. If you can’t address it, if you can’t metabolize it in some way, you can’t understand how you might be further enacting something that trickles through the system. So there’s something about an ethics here – a switch from a morality to a kind of ethics in which you don’t, from the outside, say “this is good or this is bad.” Rather, “this is the reality of the situation and the complexity of the situation, and this is how I position myself inside of it.”
I guess the culture I grew up on, and the sort of artists that I’ve loved, have also approached it a little differently. They haven’t made art that has to be a kind of telegraphing of their alignment with a certain thing – like, “we’re on this side, we’re not on this side. We fit the morality of this structure and not this structure.” My interests have been more Paul McCarthy, Philip Guston, or filmmakers like Kiarostami. Guston is not aligned with the scenes that he’s painting. In a way, what he’s saying is somehow, I’m implicated in this, and I’m uncomfortable being implicated in this, and at the same time, this stuff is being rammed down my throat, and I’m going to kind of regurgitate it as a way of commenting on the reality of that situation. If he doesn’t implicate himself, he can’t get access to the levels of what’s at play.
Sarah Blesener: Even watching it [the Task], it was really uncomfortable – I had to pause it many times. Did this work complicate your ideas around everything we’re talking about with anxieties and biases, and group dynamics?
Leigh Ledare: Well, you’re constructing a kind of field. As a participant, it’s one thing, but as a viewer, you’re also having to locate yourself somewhere. You know, by virtue of identification or identity or sympathies, however you want to play it – there’s really no safe place to stand. So, in a way, it was a portrait of the paranoia of society.
The group in the film forms a kind of collective ego in some way. It’s kind of like the group as a whole is a representative of a social psyche, and all the different parts of that psyche, all the different polls – the sadistic and masochistic polls, the erotic and death drive, all of these are present in their destructivity, the linking and unlinking and binding and unbinding. All of those impulses are present in there just as they’re present in the mind internally, but also in relationship to the subject and the other.
Sarah Blesener: You know I come from a documentary background where there’s this huge push towards authenticity. And one time you described that impulse as maybe a reaction to a fear of voyeurism. I’ve since felt really challenged in my own “willingness to go there” – and we don’t have to get fully into the project about your mom, but in regards to collaborating with her and thinking about subjectivity and implication, can you maybe speak a bit about where this work comes in?
Leigh Ledare: In terms of the work with my mother, I started making those pictures when I was 20 years old. There was a need to sort out what was happening in the family. Previously, my mother had danced for the New York City Ballet, and then now she was dancing as the erotic dancer at the Deja Vu, which was a nightclub directly next door to the apartment building where my grandparents lived. At first, it was kind of a way of distancing myself, but then it turned into a way of questioning what was happening inside the situation.
I don’t see the project simply as being a work about me and my mother or about my desire towards her – that’s secondary. There are other, more complex issues at play – how she’s wielding her sexuality towards different ends – in a way to shield herself from her aging to find a benefactor and a man who might take care of her at a moment when she was being faced with my grandmother’s decline. But also she was refuting my grandfather in a very, very loaded way for how he expected her to behave as a daughter and as a mother and as a woman her age.
And somehow I was introducing the camera into this, but the camera was kind of imbricated into a structure that already existed, like the veins on a leaf or something. This was a way of sounding it out. It was a way of materializing something that otherwise would remain immaterial and wouldn’t get processed.
Sarah Blesener: Were there moments of crisis for you throughout this?
Leigh Ledare: Yeah, I mean, certainly. In the most serious way, the question of whether to publish it as a book and to make it public. I guess it comes back to that question of dirty laundry or something, right? Do you even allow yourself the permission? I mean there’s reality and the things that are depicted that you can capture on a camera. And then there’s other issues of psychic reality that I think the work was trying to get at, like what is it to make that work relative to the symbolic markers that are present? Meaning the mother, the archetype of the mother, or the archetype of the parent. And what is it as a viewer to look at that work? Does it make you actually open up a space to reflect on your own relationships to people whom you have both affection and also love and hate towards? You know, because these relationships are so complicated, the needs are so heavy, and the disappointments are so brutal.
Also, the book is slipcased in a photograph that my grandfather sent each member of our family – the same day he presented us all with grave plots for Christmas.
Sarah Blesener: ….
Leigh Ledare: Well, and the fucked up thing was it was kind of like him acknowledging the impossible fragmentation in the family, but also inside of his impending decline and mortality, and basically saying “Before I die myself, this is the opportunity. I’d love to see you all together in life, rather than in death.”
And then I took that grave plot and attempted to give it as a gift to MOMA.
Sarah Blesener: How did that go?
Leigh Ledare: Well, it’s interesting. It’s still a conversation. The idea for it would be that when transferring the property to MOMA, they would own it so that nobody else could be buried there. So, the gift would actually be the grave plot, and it would actually be a gap between the other plots, which would speak to the lack that precipitated the gift in the first place. It’s a crazy one, but there is this piece about the ambivalence of the family, and also mapping that over the idea of the ambivalence around inclusion in the art world and in the “collection.”
Sarah Blesener: Leigh. That’s wild.
Leigh Ledare: The question with all of that stuff comes back to – how do you, how do you sublimate something? How do you take something that’s unfortunate and use it in a way that you can start to ask real questions with it?
And I would say one other thing about The Task, which is that the presence of the camera is really important. It plays all these different roles, right? It’s a stage, it’s a mirror, it’s a mother, it’s also a judge. It’s a panopticon. It’s a drug – it’s also a tool that’s used to castrate. It’s also something like a priest that allows a confession.
So you know, a lot of the work was dealing with these blind spots – these absolute resistances to being able to metabolize what was.
Sarah Blesener: What you mentioned before – the ability to look at ourselves and start from this place of private memory and reckoning with our own roles – do you have any advice for those of us who are afraid of being read symptomatically in our work?
Leigh Ledare: You know, I’m working as an analyst. Now, one thing that you realize is there’s no one out there who doesn’t have some sort of fraught relationship to things, if it hasn’t gone examined. So the question becomes, where can you find the places where you speak from and with the most truthfulness about your situation, in a way that can’t be dismissed? Because so much of the fear of the symptomatic reading is the fear of dismissal. And yet collectively, we have so much to share. None of us is without the drives and the pull between the productive and destructive urge, right?
There’s a great value in understanding how all of those parts fit together to drive something. Circling back to The Task, that film is basically lifting the hood of the car to see how the pieces underneath the hood fit together in a way to drive society, right? There’s a similar thing in one’s own work, that is, understanding that we’re a kind of accumulation of experiences, events, and positions. We take up strategies, even unconsciously, to cope with or to defend ourselves against something. The idea becomes, how is it that we can own it? How is it we can be responsible? How is it that we can act from an ethical position, which means to take responsibility for what it is that we do?
I think your question goes back to this issue of how quickly it is that people flatten the complexity of experience to simply fit into their kind of cookie cutter conception of where they put things.
The book [with my mother] that I would have made today is very different from the book I made then. But no less, its significance isn’t dampened by the fact that it’s not exactly what I would have made now. It’s in conversation with who I am now. And that’s this thing about doing this kind of work, this sort of afterwardsness of it. A memory of an event will shift based on how we need to remember it at a given point in time. These things become symbolic. They become templates for how we read ourselves. Another way to put that is if you made a work that simply ossified who you were, and that was the beginning and end of the story, and it wasn’t continued to be elaborated on or worked on or reframed or placed in a different, broader context, or in the context of time passing… then that might be problematic.
Everything demands a constant elaboration, a constant destabilizing of its meaning, and a constant kind of understanding of it from different angles. And, I have to say – the mistake is valuable. I think we’re too afraid of making mistakes.
Leigh Ledare creates work that raises questions of agency, intimacy and consent, transforming the observer into the voyeur of private scenes or situations dealing with social taboos. Using photography, the archive, language, and film, he explores notions of subjectivity in a performative dimension, his interventions putting in tension the realities of social constructions and the projective assumptions that surround them. Ledare’s projects have been exhibited extensively in the US and abroad. Ledare’s work is in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; The Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. In 2017, Ledare was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Sarah Blesener is an educator, artist, and visual researcher interested in the complexity of human relationships and their visual representation. Their approach uses guided participatory expression, pedagogy, and collaborative methodologies. Alongside photographs, Sarah uses archival imagery, mixed media, poetry, and painting. They are currently an MFA student at PSU studying Art and Social Practice.