“Marie Le Mounier’s publication Leaders is at first glance a straightforward project, culling from the internet images of ‘world leaders’ in gestures of public acknowledgement. Le Mounier’s own description of the project is succinct, but repeated ‘readings’ of this text-free book yield complexities that are not. The moment ‘frozen’ in printed in a neutral gray is simultaneously a greeting, salute, vote, signal, and reminder of the militaristic origins of the same. To paraphrase Robert Smithson - ‘Must we always look back to back to Rome?’ In the case of the political personality in public, we must.
"Like any archive, we measure our own knowledge of ‘current events’ against Leaders - and my own, good American that I am, falls way short. How many of these people can I name? How many are women? How many wear uniforms? How many raise fists? And how do I keep from reading this sequence of double-paged images as a goose-stepping parade witnessed from a concrete balcony? Le Mounier’s decision to present the images in frosty gray, as opposed to factual black and white, alienates each subject from ‘events’ and bleeds away the personal transforming the document into pictogram. Andy Warhol’s choice of the silkscreen (a medium Warhol would introduce to Robert Rauschenberg) to reproduce photography similarly transformed gritty fact into iconic fiction through the mechanical elimination of pictorial detail. Something morbid develops here for Le Mounier (as it did for Warhol); upon each image included in Leader may be projected the telescopic targer - think Charles De Gaulle in the 1973 film Day of the Jackal or simply review the Zapruder footage of the JFK assassination. But let us not forget that Warhol the devout Catholic confused the aura of fame with the Christian eternal, so perhaps every raised hand and exposed palm located by Le Mournier is not a gladiator ‘about to die’ but the benediction or tantric ‘mudra’ of an enlightened one. But to do this we must again look back to Rome.” –Tim Maul in Afterart News, October 24, 2009
