‘I suspect it is for one’s self-interest that one looks at one’s surroundings and one’s self. This search is personally born and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs’.
Lee Friedlander (1970:4)
Lee Friedlander started to photograph the American social landscape in the late 1940’s. With a career that carried well on into the new millennium he has been published and exhibited countless times. However, here I would like to briefly focus on the 30 photographs curated by John Szarkowski, alongside work from Gary Winogrand and Diane Arbus, which featured in the New Documents show at MOMA in 1967.
This show is particularly interesting to my own practice because of the wall label, written by Szarkowski, which introduced the show. It identifies the shift from objective to subjective documentary practice, which as we have seen previously, first given air by Robert Frank in the previous decade and was being pushed to its limits simultaneously on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, in Japan. It is an acknowledgment of the times where photography was discovering the photographer:
‘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 the 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’ (Hermanson-Meister, 2017:3).
Friedlander’s style of composition could sometime be described as chaotically complex. At first many of his images look like mistakes or careless exposures. However, after a little bit of spent with one of his prints, playful juxtaposition and symbolism can be found. Art critic Max Kozloff (2017:25), admits to being caught out: I used to think that Friedlander’s photographs of cheap, glowing TV’s (with V-shaped antennae) were testimonies of how boring and lonely were hotel stays for him between shoots. Then it occurred to me that he was providing an unsympathetic view of the medium that was usurping his market in magazine journalism.’
Writer David Campany, in his book On Photographs (2020) explains that ‘Friedlander has a deep love and acute understanding of the amateur’s happy accident’. In this vein, he hides his photographic talent under the veneer of a snapshot aesthetic. By including his reflection or shadow in many of his images. He demonstrated that he was unafraid to overtly acknowledge himself as a impressionistic photographer.