John Leonard Photography
The tales and tribulations of a dude and his camera
Written by Bill Leonard
The brothers Leonard (Bill, John, and Jim) grew up around photography. Our mother was the family photographer, and she was prolific. She started out with an Argus rangefinder camera, shooting mainly color slides. By the time that her kids came along she had moved on to a Kodak camera of some nature, shooting print film. The camera that I remember best used a cube of four flash bulbs on the top that was supposed to rotate after each shot. Many a “Damnation!” came from her mouth when the flash failed to operate properly.
As kids, John and I each had a Kodak Instamatic camera. No serious photography there. Where those prints ended up, I have no idea. Maybe they are in one of the trunks in my basement that are filled with our mother’s photographic output that John, Jim and I never found the time to sort through together. Sometime towards the end of junior high school, my friends Tom Wheeler and Gil Cope each started using 35mm cameras. Tom’s was a Minolta and Gil’s was his Dad’s Pentax Spotmatic. I soon acquired a Pentax Spotmatic II and got into photography. A couple of years after that I moved on to a Nikon F2 which had a bayonet lens mount that was vastly superior to the Spotmatic screw mount. The day that I bought my Nikon, John was there with me at Robert Waxman Camera in downtown Denver to buy his own Nikon F2. And so it began …
Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, for both John and me, the hobby of photography took a backseat to law school, starting families, and beginning careers. It was with some amusement that I heard from John in the mid-1990s that he had recently taken a photography backpacking trip with a couple of lawyers from his law firm in Fresno, Blake Meyen and Hilton Ryder. All three of them were shooting 35mm, and I assume that John was still using his old Nikon F2. Around this same time, Hilton started shooting a Rolleiflex model 35C 120 roll film (2 ¼ inch) medium format camera. By 2000, Hilton had changed to a Canham model DLC45 4×5 inch sheet film large format camera. When John and his family moved to Denver in 2000, he arrived with Hilton’s Rolleiflex. And that’s when the photo missions began in earnest.
I don’t know if I would call it an obsession (maybe John’s wife, Gaye, might), but John hit the road hard and heavy with his Rolleiflex, first mainly in Colorado, then branching out to New Mexico and Utah, many times on his own. Over the ensuing years he would build a body of work consisting of over 1,800 medium format (2 ¼) images and over 1,100 large format (4×5) images, both color and black and white. His medium format work dates from 2000 through the late 2000s. When Hilton started shooting a digital camera, he sold his Canham 4×5 camera to John. John’s work from the late 2000s through his last shots in August of 2023 of the Great Sage Plain adjacent to his beloved Hovenweep in southeastern corner of Utah were shot with this 4×5 camera. The images on this website are primarily his medium and large format photographs from his numerous photo missions to sites mainly in Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.
Public sightings of John’s photographs are exceedingly rare. I lost count of the number of times that I offered to do a website for him so that people could see his work and he would have a digital repository. He was not to be moved. As I’ve mentioned this to people while working on this website project, invariably the response from people who knew him is “it wasn’t his thing, he would rather be out taking photographs than organizing them”. And in the end, that is what I believe too. His vehicle was rarely unpacked of its camping and photography contents, and when he wasn’t on a trip he was planning his next trips.
I’m grateful that John’s son Bryce took an interest in photography and learned from John as Bryce’s appreciation for, and understanding of, photography and what John sought to achieve has been invaluable in this project, including the selection of the photographs on this website. One of my favorite photo trips with John was to New Mexico with Bryce and the Rolleiflex that he took over from his Dad. Not only did we get some great shots, but we also consumed numerous green chile cheeseburgers as was obligatory when traveling with John in New Mexico (pro tip: always get double green chile).
I also want to express my profound gratitude to my daughter, Laura Leonard, for her willingness to help with this project. Without her technical skills, creative aptitude, and patience, this website would still be just an idea. Laura, thank you from the bottom of my heart for making a dream a reality that will allow people to finally see John’s work and preserve it for the future.
A final thought on my brother. Why, you might ask, in the age of digital photography, would John choose to continue to shoot film? That question would become even more pointed regarding his 4×5 work when you consider the effort that it took to carry the weight of the camera gear, set it up, compose the shot (by the way, the image that he saw in his camera was upside down which I always considered challenging), and then take it all down and hike back out. My answer is that he did it because he was an artist. He enjoyed the technical and creative aspects of film photography. There is a deep satisfaction in taking a “money shot” that came from your own hands, not from the magic of digital wizardry. It is a privilege to be involved with this project to share John’s art and vision with you.
