Lee Friedlander
(1934-)
Lee Friedlander; Peter Galassi, MOMA
Excerpts
“The only deterrent [from shooting a lot] is the tedium of darkroom labor that lies ahead, which is where Friedlander’s work habits come into the picture. Early on he mustered the discipline to keep up with his obsession.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 14
“It is little wonder that Friedlander loves photography books: with books by Atget, Evans, and Frank on his shelf he had everything he needed. He had the essential lineaments of an authentic tradition, whose coherence and identity had been lost in the shuffle of the magazine world but whose forward momentum would soon redevelop in his own work. At the core of that tradition was what we have come to call the vernacular… denoting the indigenous and common rather than the exotic and sophisticated… This was the lesson that Evans took from Frank: that the most ordinary thing—precisely because it is ordinary— can be made to speak through the vernacular language of photography… fill their pictures with messages from the people.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 33
“Friedlander once told me that in his view Atget [large camera] and Lartrigue [small camera] had together defined the range of photography’s formal potential, which any subsequent photographer had only to apply to his or her place and time. He said that he found this circumstance liberating, creating a freedom from the obligation to invent. I did not argue with his sweeping indifference to the matter of personal artistic sensibility, but I recognized in it a clue to his own. He elected as the fathers of the modern art photography two photographers who nominally had not been artists. One was a seasoned professional who worked day in and day out for over three decades; the other was a teenager. Neither had any reason for achieving what they did, except the love of making photographs.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 34
“During a slide presentation in the early 1970s, a member of the audience asked Friedlander what he had been thinking when he made the picture then on the screen. Friedlander shot back: ‘Would you ask Oscar Robertson what he was thinking when someone throws him the ball?’”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 34
“‘I always wanted to be a photographer. I was fascinated with the materials. But I never dreamed I would be having so much fun. I imagined something much less elusive, much more mundane.’”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 35
“… [in using a small Leica] the photographer is an invisible observer. The theater of humanity plays every day on every street—admission free… The impromptu social constellation is forever changing, and the shape it might take at any one moment, when seen from any one spot, is impossible to predict. Hence the seductive conceit of spontaneity—the photographer’s intuitive, athletic talent for grasping momentary sense from the chaos of unending flux.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 36
“The persuasive clarity of what Cartier-Bresson called ‘the decisive moment’ is not a condition of the world; it is a condition of the picture. To achieve it the photographer must first develop a sense of opportunity—an alertness to worldly circumstances that might yield a coherent image.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 36
“He was exploring the fixed vernacular scene… material so richly expressive of human strivings and pleasures and foibles that the actual presence of people was beside the point. Confident that this material would speak its mind no matter what, Friedlander was free to play with the picture without worrying about what it might mean.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 37
“Human beings—or rather bits and pieces of them—do show up in Friedlander’s asphalt jungle, but these utterly pedestrian figures are just part of the furniture of the street, as solid and immobile as the poles and hydrants and motionless revolving doors that surround and enclose them. Their lives are none of our business.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 39
“Friedlander’s deadpan wit and elaborate pictorial amusements have occasionally been attacked as empty gestures, but there is a serious message in his refusal to reproduce the ready meanings and easy sentiments of the most successful photography of his youth. The insistent artistry of his ‘60s work did not represent a retreat from the world; he was walking the same streets as everyone else. But his pictures suggested that the meanings of that world were too complicated, and too precious, to be subjected to a prepackaged morality.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 40
“… Friedlander’s trusting curiosity—the confidence, at once unassuming and audacious, that the lessons of the past and the wiles of his craft will conspire with the fascination of his eye and the concreteness of his subject to create something that he himself couldn’t have guessed at.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 58
“… Friedlander was prompted to talk about his lifelong habit of welcoming foreground obstructions that others typically avoid. He acknowledged that, while ‘somebody else could walk two feet away to get those poles and trees and other stuff out of the way, I almost walk two feet to get into it, because it is part of the game that I play. It isn’t even conscious; I probably just drift into it… It’s like a found pleasure. You’ve found something that you like and you play with it for the rest of your life.’”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 60
“Friedlander is addicted to making photographs, and he only photographs what interests him.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 61
“… consider a paradox that lies at the core of Friedlander’s art as a whole: while confidently mastering photography’s complicated syntax, deploying it picture by picture with an ever more persuasive sensuality, he has increasingly cultivated the medium’s potential for profligate accumulation. Even as he has staked an unarguable claim for the artistic prowess of his medium, he has celebrated its mundane democracy, dissolving its princely independence into the familiar duties of a reliable servant.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 63
“… he is literally a fair-weather photographer, forever eager to see everything under the sun and hopelessly in love with the adventurous architecture of shadow.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 74
“His uncanny instinct for seeing the world as a picture erases the distinction between a blunt declaration of fact and the flamboyant whimsy of pictorial invention. It is impossible to disentangle the childlike urgency of his curiosity from the mature detachment of his artifice.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 76
“For decades now Friedlander has been all at once a humble maker of straightforward documents, a protean creator of modernist forms, and a charlatan weaver of postmodernists webs. In any given picture he may seem at first to be wearing only one of these guises, but we don’t need to get terribly deep into the work to see that they are all aspects of a single persona—an unrepentant rake incessantly repeating photography’s original sin. All that has changed, really, is that Friedlander’s renderings of his affectionate regard have grown ever more ample and sensuous.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 77
Style
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Themes
- television sets
- monuments
- scrub, bushes, chain link fences
- nudes
- portraits
- workers
- letters
- desert
Plates (favorites)
42 Friedlander’s shirtless shadow falling upon desert sand, scrub, and rocks of Canyon de Chelly
“Friedlander’s photograph is a deft performance of silvery craft—a masterpiece of figure and ground, if you will—that delicately traces the fellow’s rocky innards and grassy scalp and displays perfect pitch for the codependence of scorching sunlight and cool shadow.” p. 72
58
75, 78-83, 88, 90, 91, 93
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466
612`
My Opinions
~ Friedlander’s photography of the ordinary is just that—ordinary, very blasé, uninteresting, a ridiculous waste of time (i.e. monuments, portraits, statuary), mere snapshots at best, some carefully composed, others selected for their freezing of motion.
~ Though I have no appreciation for most of his series (i.e. landscapes, workers, monuments, etc.), I find his series on televisions fascinating. In this series mere objects in a room take on a life of their own.
~ Friedlander’s nudes are uncomfortable, weird poses. The figures seem trapped between nakedness and poorly realized attempts at artistic posing.
~ Nothing special about his more formal portraits in which he attempts to capture people in relaxed, unposed states
Questions
~ Why did Friedlander rise to fame?
Thoughts on Photography
“The notion of a body of work—a group of pictures greater than the sum of its parts, unified often by theme and always by style and sensibility—is fundamental to modern art of photography. Considered one by one, some of the pictures are inevitably better than others, but the sense of the whole depends on the profusion of its parts.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 14
“The point is the same one that animates any retrospective: the attempt to see, by looking back, what the artist himself could not have envisioned at the outset.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 15
[Excellent historical information regarding timeline of early influential photographers p. 32-33]
“Atget, Evans, and others who turned the documentary from a passive function into an artful style discovered how to raise the charge while pretending to do nothing at all. They showed that just when the photograph seems most passive, as if merely opening a window on the world, it can absorb from the scene a stubborn autonomy.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 37
“‘We may say that we see the world with entirely different eyes,’ wrote Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in 1927, relishing the the revelation that ‘so called faulty photographs and accidental shots’ are in fact expressions of photography’s empirical vision—that the camera’s mindless objectivity can jolt us into seeing things anew.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 38
“In the text introducing the [New Documents] exhibition, Szarkowski wrote, ‘Most of those who were called documentary photographers a generation ago, when the label was new, made their pictures in the service of a social cause. It was their aim to show what was wrong with the world, and to persuade their fellows to take action and make it right. In the past decade a new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life, but to know it. Their work betrays a sympathy—almost an affection—for the imperfections and frailties of society. They like the real world, in spite of its terrors, as the source of all wonder and fascination and value—no less precious for being irrational.’”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 40
“It’s axiomatic that any photograph that describes its subject with a minimum of clarity grows in interest as it gets older.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 63
“But to create an articulate picture the photographer must understand what he or she is looking at… The language of photography is intimately dependent upon the local idiom of whatever it seeks to describe, and a master of the former is adrift without an intuitive grasp of the latter.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 73
“Those of us who only look at photographs need to to remind ourselves that making them is a physical adventure in which (if the photographer is any good) obdurate realities and elusive intuitions figure far more prominently than memories of pictures past.”
Friedlander, You Have to Change to Stay the Same, Peter Galassi, p. 76