Download PDF scan of original article

Ansel Adams points to a relationship between his pictures and his early studies as a classical pianist. Lee Friedlander’s music is jazz.

Since the mid-1960s when his work was introduced in two major exhibitions (“Toward a Social Landscape” at the George Eastman House, and “The New Documents” at the Museum of Modern Art), Lee Friedlander has consistently and regularly jolted the audience for photography with his originality and intelligence.

Over the years, he has developed a style outside of fashion—a new vocabulary, in fact, for the medium of photography. It is a language based on the inherent characteristics—even the flaws—of the medium itself.

Given the internal logic of his system, it’s a small wonder that few photographers familiar with it can avoid borrowing at least some of the grammar. Still, he continues to maintain his uniqueness by his effort to pare away painting-derived conventions of form and perspective.

In a Friedlander photograph, focus is not some inviolate law, but a matter of creative choice. The tendency of a camera lens to flatten space, and that of black and white paper to meld tones where colors might have allowed the eye to separate forms, are exploited for their ability to combine elements of the picture into surprising gestalts. Seemingly extraneous detail becomes a subtle mosaic pattern.

The earliest photographers drew heavily on the popular engravings, etchings, lithographs, and paintings of their day for picture ideas and inspiration. Lee Friedlander grew up with postcards, snapshots, the Modern movement in painting, and the work of the great documentary photographer Walker Evans.

Friedlander has used this new system in a way which has changed substantially over the last several years. Earlier work was often laden with a sort of sloganistic politics characteristic of the time. These pictures intimated a trashy, materialistic culture of disengaged heads and bodies, an alienating society which cancels people as nonchalantly and as inexorably as a teller cancels checks.

There are people who construct with words remarkable evocations of the things they love. They seem able to apply a ready verbal wit to any situation. They can apparently (though of course it’s only an illusion) bestow their gift of speech on a dumb and oblivious world. Lee Friedlander is a photographer.

When Friedlander’s book, The American Monument,¹ was released in 1976 it revealed a shift which had been only subtly apparent during the years which had intervened since he first came to prominence. The most obvious change had to do with subject matter: the book reproduced hundreds of more or less straightforward documents of historical markers around the country. While many of the pictures were constructed as the same kind of visual puns and puzzles he had presented in the past, Friedlander now displayed a much less critical attitude toward American culture. In fact, the book was nothing less than an embrace of the culture’s history and values.

That seemed more than a little surprising in light of the sharp cynicism which was so clearly a part of the pictures shown in the 1960s and early ’70s. But one did get the clear feeling that “History” and “Values” as described in these pictures were as abstract and idealized as the sculptures and plaques which stood as their metaphors. Quiet, unpeopled parkscapes formed intimate chapels—or grand city facades made up elaborate frames—for monuments to unreal, unbreathing heroes.

Now, we are faced with yet another major re-emergence of this prolific and evasive picture-maker. Most of the photographs reproduced in this issue of the Bulletin have only recently been printed by Friedlander for exhibition, and have not been published elsewhere. This latest work seems to me an expression of joy in detail and a delight in seeing that transcends the photographer’s earlier concerns. It is an affirmation of the unalterable beauties of a world which, left to describe itself on its own terms, might offer us only light and life and order.

1. Major books of Friedlander’s work are: Work from the Same House (in conjunction with Jim Dine) (London: Trigram Press, 1969); Self Portrait (New City, NY: Haywire Press, 1970); The American Monument (New York: Eakins Press, 1976); Lee Friedlander: Photographs (New City, NY: Haywire Press, 1978); Flowers and Trees (New City, NY: Haywire Press, 1981). ↩︎