The Artful Snapshot

Slate - What makes Lee Friedlander's pictures good? By Lee Siegel: "The history of modern art photography is, to a great extent, the history of the tension between the painterly photograph and the snapshot. For decades after its beginnings in the mid-19th century, photography was a (seemingly) simple matter of recording the visible world. That changed with Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), who made photographs that had all the formal compositional qualities of a canvas by Cézanne. With the advent of the hand-held Leica camera in the mid-1920s, photographers acquired the capacity to go out into the world—updating the 19th-century flâneur—to try to capture that instant when visible reality itself seemed to yield an artistic result. This was what Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) famously called "the decisive moment." Yet such pictures risk prettifying what they document. And "documentary" snapshots are vulnerable to the pitfall of the easy social or psychological irony. Lee Friedlander's photographs almost always play with this tension between imposed and captured poetic meaning—between, for example, the painted figure of "Rome" and its dozing man's dangling limbs. This makes even Friedlander's occasional failures dramatic commentaries on the nature of seeing and of apprehending what you see

"Lee's pictures show who these people were when they weren't being who they were." The formulation nicely sums up Friedlander's best photographs, which often seem to invoke visual clichés only to deconstruct them. In other hands, Friedlander's image of a television perched on a dresser in a hotel room would be an ironic commentary on the battle between the artificial and the real in contemporary life. But Friedlander resists that easy meaning. The television's image is as "real" as the dresser beneath it.

While working as a freelance photojournalist, Friedlander came under the influence of art photographers such as Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand—both of whom were mordant social commentators—and older, more naturalistic photographers such as Walker Evans and the great 19th-century documenter of Paris, Eugene Atget. Hovering above all these precedents were the aesthetic purities of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand. Friedlander, in fact, is an anthology of influences, which he seems mischievously to want to reveal and play off against one another. Tarrytown strikingly enacts the conflict between painterly photograph and snapshot. There is the formal balance of Tarrytown's house, brick wall, sloping street, wires, shadows, and poles. Yet the composition is so subtly insinuated that you take in the sheer presence of these things before you apprehend the beautiful way Friedlander's camera has marshaled them into order. Tarrytown resists poetry as it creates it. It recalls a remark that Winogrand once made: "There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described."

Consider the way Friedlander includes his shadow in some photographs. Some critics interpret this as a playful reference to the amateur photographer's elemental mistake: standing with your back to the sun. Other interpretations explain the shadow as the photographer's alter ego—here stalking a blonde—or as the Beckettian absurdity of a self in bondage to its inescapable ... self. All these perspectives are plausible. Here's another interpretation: Our shadow falls all over the place, constantly; only careful expertise with a camera can hide it in a photograph. Yet only an equally careful expertise can choreograph the "mistake" of a photographer including his shadow as part of reality's random mess. By snapping his shadow, Friedlander is making the twin specters that haunt photography cancel each other out. The picture can't be self-consciously esthetic, because of the shadow. Yet it's not just a glib snapshot invoking photography's limitations; its premeditated spontaneity alludes to the paradoxes of the form. Friedlander's playfulness about photography's essential tension is a type of sincerity about photography's way of seeing.

Yet what gives this show a kind of revelatory suspense is the fact that Friedlander isn't always sober and poised. He can descend into facile irony, too. Broadly speaking, art photography in the 20th century consists of two trends. One finds poetic or social meaning in things as they are—Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment," and the other imposes such meanings on an otherwise neutral occasion, an imposition that the photographer accomplishes through a careful choreography of perspectives. Father Duffy exemplifies the latter trend. Juxtaposing the First World War's famous soldier/priest against the vertical Coca-Cola sign and against the horizontal Broadway-tickets signs, the photograph seems to be a statement of how commercial society cheapens, even crucifies, its most hallowed figures. Significantly—and unfortunately—it appears on the cover of the catalogue for this show. Too much contemporary photography reduces the visible world to a slick bundle of superficial concepts."