The Face Knife

As new as I am to discussing cinema in a serious fashion (if I can even manage that), I have even more difficulty discussing photography. Simply put, I don’t know what makes a given photo a “masterpiece.” I can find hundreds of photos clever in composition and subject, but i don’t think i’ve ever seen a photograph that’s as inexhaustible as a painting (or a film, or a novel). There’s something static and fixed about photographic meaning (to me), some limits of art that photography cannot break through, no matter how abstract or conceptual. When looking at photographic images, I’m some sort of formalist at heart; narrative work doesn’t really excite me. The works of, say, a fabulist like Gregory Crewdson don’t create any “negative space” (in the Manny Farber use of the term) in my mind. They’re just cluttered and posed and I really don’t care about the world the photographer is trying to create (while the same tactics highly interest me in film.) I’m more interested in the way pictorial space in a photo is divided, whether it’s through framing or depth of field.

Lee Friedlander’s work looks accidental. The early work on display is full of shadows, reflections and other artifacts a “professional” photographer would avoid. We can tell by his early commercial work (mostly portraits of Jazz artists) that Friedlander is more than technically competent, so why the obstructed shots, why the occluding shadows?

I think it’s a sort of whimsical formalism, a way to divide space without heavy vertical and horizontal lines. A truck’s rearview mirror turns a flat, midwestern landscape into a strange, almost cubist triptych. The reverse side of a “Yield” sign is a Suprematist triangle dominating the landscape, with a long shadowy brother subverting the artiness. An old couple stands in front of an International style building, looking and pointing at Mount Rushmore, which we can see reflected in the large, square windows of the building behind them.

Most of Friedlander’s work was made with a 35mm Leica, until in the 80s[tk] he acquired a medium format Hassellblad with a wide-angle lens. The clarity and depth of his pictures immediately improved, but he continued to tackle some of the same subjects, almost to the point of duplicating subject matter he had photographed with a normal depth of focus in this new, wide-angle realm. It’s like the formalism of his early work suddenly sprang into 3D life.

Friedlander’s work was a welcome respite from the Big Germanism that dominates contemporary photography. His photos show that one can be clever, and conceptual without making a one’s cleverness the subject of the work.

“Friedlander” is at MoMA in New York until August 29.