Change and Permanence, Captured by Cameras

Photography works best as a medium when it is purely documentary, and becomes art in the process.

clipped from www.nytimes.com The earliest pictures are of the Lower East Side, where Ms. Leonard lived in the early 1990s; she began taking them with a 1940s Rolleiflex camera as the neighborhood started gentrifying. Inexpensive clothing shops, appliances stores and other storefront businesses that she passed every day were closing, made obsolete by brand-name outlets. Sooner, rather than later, a particular world she had taken for granted would be gone.