As a longtime fan of the Our Hen House podcast, I’m so excited and honored to be featured on show, which is my first interview since 2019.

The segment begins at around the 15:22 mark.

Mariann Sullivan is such a brilliant interviewer and I really enjoyed our discussion. In addition to talking about Allowed to Grow Old, our chat covers new topics, like my evolving thinking about how social media is killing our capacity for empathy and how we engage with images. I also talk about what I’ve been up to in the studio during the pandemic and my plans for future work.

Private Online Event for Our Hen House Supporters

Our Hen House is a 501(c)(3) women + LGBTQ-run nonprofit organization dedicated to effectively mainstreaming the movement to end the exploitation of animals. Supporters of Our Hen House who donate a one-time annual gift of $100 (or a recurring donation of $10/month) become members of the Our Hen House Flock.

Flock members receive spiffy perks like:

• Weekly bonus content (including extended footage from my interview with Mariann available ONLY to Flock members)

• Access to a private “Flock Only” Facebook group;

• An open invitation to Flock Friday weekly Zoom meetings featuring special guests from the podcast

I’m excited to share that I will be a guest at the December Flock Friday Zoom meeting. Join the Flock before December 2nd and you will be able to join me at this intimate gathering where I will chat about my work and activism and also answer your questions. I look forward to seeing you there!

Last week, I gave an online artist lecture that was part of the Tufts University Hoch Cunningham Environmental Lecture series. The lecture was recorded and can be viewed below or on YouTube.

I encourage you to watch the lecture video to the very end. The student questions that I received after my presentation were FANTASTIC. It was really exciting to talk with students who were engaging with my work so thoughtfully.

I am grateful to the Tufts Environmental Studies Department and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts for hosting me. I also want to thank Alex Blanchette, who invited me to speak and who introduced me at the event. I highly recommend checking out Alex’s book, Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm that was released last year by Duke University Press.

This year I have released several affordable items including cards, a fine-art poster, and my first book, Allowed to Grow Old released in May by the University of Chicago Press. These items make perfect gifts for photography &/or animal lovers in your life.

And of course I am still offering limited edition prints sold exclusively through my galleries. In addition, I have released a Collector’s Edition for Allowed to Grow Old that will make the perfect gift for someone very special in your life. There is something for everyone on your list. Don’t forget to also treat yourself during this season. :-)

Below is an overview of gift options featuring my images. Give the gift of art this holiday season! It is a far more unique and meaningful gift than anything you will find at a big box store, and you will get warm fuzzies knowing that you are supporting independent artists.

Thank you for supporting my work during this holiday season!

gifts Below $20

I recently partnered with Farm Sanctuary to create a set of greeting cards with three of my images from Allowed to Grow Old. The animals who appear on the cards were photographed at Farm Sanctuary’s shelters, which I visited several times while working on my book.

100% of the proceeds from these cards go directly to Farm Sanctuary. As one of the nation’s largest animal sanctuaries, Farm Sanctuary has rescued thousands of animals and has cared for them at its sanctuaries in New York and California. At Farm Sanctuary, animals are friends, not food. The organization educates millions of people about the plight of farm animals and the negative impacts of factory farming on health, the environment and social justice. Farm Sanctuary also advocates for laws and policies that prevent suffering and promote compassion, and it reaches out to legislators and businesses to bring about institutional reforms.

gifts priced $27-40

Looking for the perfect gift for animal lovers in your life? Purchase copies of my first book, Allowed to Grow Old, which was featured in The New York Times Holiday Gift Guide and was picked by BuzzFeed as one of the best photography books of 2019. The list price for the book is $40, but you can find new copies for as low as $27 on Amazon.

WHY PAY LIST PRICE?
Please consider purchasing the book at list price ($40) through your local independent bookstore or through Pasado’s Safe Haven, one of the sanctuaries Isa visited while working on her book. Please also consider supporting the University of Chicago Press by ordering directly through them. For details on why it’s important to support small publishers, see this article.

SIGNED COPIES
Signed copies of Allowed to Grow Old are available through:
ClampArt Gallery, Griffin Museum of Photography, Photo-Eye Bookstore, Richard Levy Gallery, and Water Street Bookstore .

Most of these signed copies are still first-edition copies. Keep in mind that Allowed to Grow Old has now entered its second printing. Snatch up a signed first-edition copy while you can.

PERSONALIZED INSCRIPTIONS
Order personalized inscriptions for your copies of Allowed to Grow Old exclusively through Water Street Bookstore. At checkout, include the text you would like inscribed on your book in the “order comment” field. Water Street Books is based in Exeter, NH, but they ship internationally.

If you are near Peabody, MA, you can also attend my upcoming reading & book signing on December 14, noon-3 PM at the Barnes & Noble Peabody located at the Northshore Mall on 210 Andover Street. For additional details, visit the Event Page on Facebook.

gifts priced $50-75

Give the gift of affordable art by purchasing a fine art poster of “Bessie, Holstein Cow, Age 20”, one of my favorite images from Allowed to Grow Old.

This is no dorm room poster. I worked closely with Brilliant Graphics and designer James Goncalves to create a high-quality poster that would look beautiful hung directly on the wall or framed. It is printed with fade resistant matte inks on Sappi McCoy 100 lb card-weight paper that is acid-free and archival. The poster retails for $50 unsigned; signed, $75.

25% of the profits from poster sales will go to Pasado's Safe Haven where Bessie had resided.

HOLIDAY SHIPPING NOTE:
Order by midnight on Sunday, December 15th, in order to receive your order by December 24th. Any orders after that date will ship after Christmas.

LUXURY GIFTS

LIMITED EDITION PRINTS
For a very special gift, you can purchase limited edition prints from Allowed to Grow Old sold exclusively through galleries that represent my work. Contact either the Richard Levy Gallery or ClampArt Gallery to inquire about print sizes, availability, and pricing. In addition, both galleries have a selection of available prints listed on Artnet and on Artsy that you can browse. Print prices begin at $800 and increase an an edition sells out.

ALLOWED TO GROW OLD COLLECTOR’S EDITION
Another special gift option is the Collector's Edition for Allowed to Grow Old, which includes:
Handmade box covered with linen and lined with cotton rag paper
Handmade bifold portfolio covered with vintage kyoseishi paper
Archival Pigment Print of Cecil, LaMancha/Saanen Crossbreed, Age 14+ signed verso in pencil
Letterpress printed colophon signed by me and bookbinder Rebecca Fisher Staley
Signed hardcover copy of Allowed to Grow Old

Edition Size : 15 with 3 Artist Proofs
Price increases as the edition sells out; 5 have already sold, bringing the current price to $1600.

PRICELESS GIFTS

For another special gift, you can make a donation to an animal sanctuary in honor of a loved one. Most of these sanctuaries have animal sponsorship programs that you can give as gifts. I have compiled a list of sanctuaries I have visited for Allowed to Grow Old. Many of these sanctuaries have online shops that sell branded t-shirts, sweatshirts, books, cards, and other household items that make excellent gifts and allow you to support the vital work of these organizations.

the New york times holiday gift guide

Allowed to Grow Old was selected by The New York Times as a coffee-table book recommendation for the 2019 Holiday Gift Guide. The Guide ran as a supplement in the November 29th print edition and was published online as well.

Buzzfeed news Best photography books of 2019

BuzzFeed News photo essay editor Gabriel Sanchez picked Allowed to Grow Old as one of his favorite photography books of 2019.

What Will You Remember? Best Photography Books of 2019

Elin Spring and Suzanne Révy from the photography blog What Will You Remember? picked Allowed to Grow Old as one of their favorite photography books of 2019.

Now This News accompanied Isa to Arthur’s Acres Animal Sanctuary in October to produce a short film about her work and about the sanctuary. The film garnered over 246,000 views on Facebook, over 30,000 views on Twitter, and over 32,000 views on Instagram.

Isa’s exhibition at ClampArt Gallery in New York City received a beautifully written review in Collector Daily. Loring Knoblauch writes:
“Isa Leshko’s photographs of the elderly fit right into this tradition of attentive portrait making. After building trust with her sitters, she gets in close, making empathetic portraits that tenderly capture the personalities of her subjects. Like many elders, they each continue to struggle along, with loneliness, weariness, battered bodies, and the residues of hardships endured, both physical and emotional. But Leshko has photographed them with respect and dignity, teasing out flashes of recognition from even the most reluctant of her subjects. She has taken the time to be present, and that investment pays off in pictures that consistently tell rich stories.

The twist in this narrative comes from the fact that her elderly sitters aren’t people, but animals. Saved from the slaughterhouse, deliberate extermination, or the veterinary euphemism of “being put down”, these aging farm animals, racehorses, wild sheep, and rescue dogs now inhabit various animal sanctuaries around the United States, where they can comfortably live out their days in the animal equivalent of a human nursing home or retirement community.

That we’re not particularly used to seeing photographs of elderly animals is mostly a reflection of our often one-sided relationship with horses, cows, pigs, sheep, and other farm animals. We tend to see these animals through the lens of our own human needs, so when they are too old to do our back-breaking work, to provide us with milk or meat, or to create the next generation of thoroughbred race winners, we tend to consider them worthless. And so we summarily end their lives, leaving very few to actually reach old age.

Leshko’s sensitive portraits of these unlikely animal survivors will make you wonder about the morality of such decisions, and about our treatment of animals more generally….

Most animal photography has a cloying cuteness or a reflected sense of what humans want animals to be, so the fact that Leshko’s photographs reframe the interaction, in essence giving the animals the opportunity to tell their own stories for once, makes her pictures stand out. By respectfully showing us the beauty and dignity to be found in aging animals of all kinds, she has offered us humans both a measure of guilt at how we have treated them and an encouragement to forward-looking advocacy on their behalf. Her compassionate, gentle, well-crafted portraits remind us that we can do better for these animals, if we only take a moment to see them as sentient, feeling individuals.”

Isa’s exhibition at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA received a lovely review in The Boston Globe. Critic Mark Feeney writes:
“Shot in natural light, the photographs are black and white. This makes for a slight distancing effect, as color would not. That bit of distance ensures that while Leshko’s subjects look charming and moving and lovable, which they certainly do, they’re never cute. In an artist’s statement, Leshko notes that she strove to capture each creature’s “unique personality.” On the evidence of these pictures, she succeeded. What you see — what you feel — is respect no less than affection….

These photographs will make you smile. Cumulatively, as Leshko intends, they also can’t help but make you think. Depending on how willing you are to follow that thinking to its logical conclusion, tears may succeed smiles.”

The popular photography blog, What Will You Remember? also reviewed Isa’s exhibition at the Griffin Museum. Elin Spring writes:
“Allowed to Grow Old is a meditation on the inevitability of death coupled with sanctity of life, told through sensitive portraits of rescued farm animals growing old in sanctuaries.

While understanding that each animal has a personality, Leshko nonetheless manages to avoid the pitfall of attempting to humanize them. Instead, she has drawn incisive analogies. She approaches her subjects at eye-level, considerate of their spatial boundaries while mindful of visual spatial relationships. The magnificence of their physical presence is realized through Leshko’s exquisite, intimate prints whose contrast confers dimensionality and whose broad tonal range renders fur and feathers with lush texture and sensuality. A serene peacefulness emanates from Leshko’s images, evoking a sense of gratitude and empathy, which the artist admittedly hopes will be the first step toward activism.”

Below are installation images from Isa’s Allowed to Grow Old exhibit that runs through November 16th at ClampArt in NYC.

In addition to the work hanging on the walls, ClampArt also has a complete portfolio of viewing prints from her series. The gallery also has signed copies of Allowed to Grow Old are available for purchase. ClampArt is open Tuesday-Saturday 10 AM-6 PM.

Isa thanks Panopticon Imaging for doing a beautiful job printing work for this show &  Adjective Art & Framing for their lovely framing work.

Allowed to Grow Old is featured in the September/October issue of Photograph. The magazine’s editor Jean Dykstra writes: “Leshko’s portraits bring to mind Peter Hujar’s photographs of animals, which similarly captured the particularity of a dog or horse (or goose or goat), a sense of that creature’s individual consciousness. Leshko’s photographs, too, are rich in respect and empathy while avoiding sentimentality….Whatever viewers’ thoughts on animal rights, her pictures give us pause to consider why some are cherished pets and others are disposable.”

Isa and her work were featured in a fantastic profile piece by Brigit Katz for Tenderly. Here is one of her favorite passages from the article:

“[Isa] relates what she initially describes as a “cheesy” anecdote, though she subsequently corrects herself: “It’s funny for a vegan to say cheesy. This is going to really sound Daiya-ish.” Allowed to Grow Old was printed in Altona, a Canadian town not far from Winnipeg. For an intense few days, Leshko was constantly on hand at the press to inspect each page. “It could have been sleep deprivation,” she says, “but I did have this mental picture of all the animals in the project behind me as I was looking at the pages in the book.”

“So,” she adds, “they’re still with me.”

Isa was also recently interviewed by Anna Mackiewicz for We Animals Media. Here is an excerpt from their discussion:

How do you think the way we understand animals is changing? 

Our understanding of animals is definitely improving, especially among scientists. From the early twentieth century through to the 1990s, animal behaviorists rejected the idea that animals were capable of thought or emotion. They posited that all animal behavior was the result of hard-wired reflexes or learned associations between positive or negative stimuli. Over the last three decades, this theory has been challenged by research in the fields of evolutionary biology, cognitive ethology, zoology, and neuroscience. Although some behaviorists still resist attributing “human-like” mental processes to nonhuman animals, the prevailing scientific view is that all vertebrates and many invertebrates (e.g., cephalopods such as squids and octopuses) are sentient beings that have emotions and cognitive capabilities we are just beginning to grasp. 

That said, we are living in an era in which empathy is in increasingly short supply as xenophobia and nationalism continues to spread throughout Europe and America. Across the world political policies are increasingly designed to maximize cruelty toward minority populations, especially immigrants.

This same callousness is also directed toward non-human animals. It’s true that in recent years there have been some legislative victories for non-human animals in America, such as the successful Yes on 12 campaign in California, which has increased protections for farmed animals from extreme confinement. But there have been many devastating developments, especially regarding the weakening of protections for wildlife and recent evidence that the USDA is failing to report violations of animal welfare laws at puppy mills, research labs and zoos. Also troubling, the Trump administration has proposed a new rule that will cut the number of federal inspectors at pig slaughterhouses by 40 per cent and instead shift oversight to plant employees. Under the new rule there also will be no limit on slaughter-line speeds. This is absolutely gut-wrenching. 

Would it be correct to say that you see animal rights as deeply connected to broader rights issues, and the current political environment?

I’ve spent the last several months thinking about the connections between speciesism, racism and sexism in light of what has been unfolding in America. President Trump has called his political enemies “dogs” on several occasions and routinely uses dehumanizing language to refer to undocumented immigrants and refugees. He has gone as far as referring to immigration as an “infestation”. There is even an article on the White House web site describing members of the MS-13 gang as “violent animals.” This likening of humans to animals both dehumanizes people, and reinforces the idea that animals are inferior to humans. History has shown us that governments apply dehumanizing language towards a minority as a precursor to committing atrocities against them.

I have yet to address what has been happening in America through my art. But I have little doubt that my anger and fear over the last several years will find its way into my artwork.

Here are the highlights of recent reviews and other press for Allowed to Grow Old from the last month.

"A poignant creation. . . . one of the things that is so remarkable about the portraits – you can see each animal's personality; their singularity and distinction. Each is a beautiful, living individual, not some abstract "thing" produced en masse at a factory for the purpose of fueling humans....Allowed to Grow Old opens a window into possibilities that most of don't think to imagine: What would that cheap, supermarket chicken have become if given the chance?"

"For each picture, Leshko approaches her subjects with the same dignity that she would a human being, taking the time to get to understand each of the animal's mannerisms and unique personalities. Since most of these rescues come from places of extreme cruelty such as slaughterhouses and factory farms, Leshko's special care and patience is crucial to building trust between animal and artist."

"That’s what makes the photos so special — and so arresting. When seeing a 33-year-old horse or a 28-year-old goose depicted in a dignified yet unflinching way, it’s difficult not to dwell on the inevitabilities humans and animals share. And, regardless of where a person falls on the meat-eating vs. vegetarian spectrum, it’s also hard to avoid thinking about an animal’s ability to experience pain and fear, as well as pleasure and contentment."

“Allowed to Grow Old is an acknowledgment of the failings of the human race–grave injustices perpetrated against unseen and unheard animals. It’s also a tribute to the power of forgiveness and the possibility of redemption.”

additional press links

Isa has appeared on a flurry of podcasts recently to discuss the release of Allowed to Grow Old. Below is a sampling of recent interviews; click on the logo to visit each podcast site.