Leonard Nones: Essential Workers, Part II
October 1–December 15, 2024 

Leonard Nones, Mohammed Khan, Housekeeper, Housekeeping, 2024. Inkjet print, 19 x 13 in.

Leonard Nones: Essential Workers, Part II features photographer Leonard Nones’s portraits of staff on RiverSpring Living’s Riverdale campus. The series of twenty archival inkjet prints are tributes to the strength, resilience, and compassion of all the people who work with the Hebrew Home’s residents. They were inspired by the influential Vogue photographer Irving Penn’s Small Trades (1950–51). Penn’s subjects brought with them “the tools of their trades” just as RiverSpring Living’s staff members have. Like Penn, who invited tradesmen and women into his studio and photographed them against a simple cloth backdrop, Nones welcomed staff into the makeshift studio he set up in the dining room of RiverWalk, an independent living community he lives in that is part of RiverSpring Living in Riverdale.

 

This is the second series of portraits of staff Nones has completed. They reflect the originality of Nones’s eye combined with compositional and conceptual elements from Penn’s series. The sitters’ readiness and confidence are marks of the professionalism, dedication, and skill they bring to their positions in caring for others. RiverSpring Living’s collaboration with Nones similarly honors all of its employees for their commitment to the older adults they serve.

Leonard Nones worked as a photographer for fifty years. He was born in 1930 in Philadelphia to Lena née Greenberg and Martin Nones. After graduating from South Philadelphia High School, he worked as an apprentice with a commercial photography studio in Philadelphia. With that experience and a small portfolio, he decided to seek work as a freelance photographer in New York City.

His work has appeared in such magazines as McCalls, Red Book, GQ, True Magazine, Life, Time, and others. He has photographed famous personalities including Lyndon Johnson at his ranch in Texas when he was President of the United States, and many others from the sporting world to Hollywood actors. His work has taken him around the world, including a challenging advertising campaign in a plane over Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. After that experience, Nones became a pilot, flew his own plane, and was instrument rated.

Nones met his future wife, Sondra Fox, who was also from Philadelphia, on a blind date. She was a fashion illustrator and later a stylist in her husband’s studio. They were married in 1955 and were happily married for sixty-five years until her death in 2020. They have two daughters, Karen London and Margot Nones, and three grandchildren, Rebecca London and Philip London and Philip’s wife Lola Guerrero Larrea.

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This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

All images courtesy the artist.