The Shadowed Image
Friedlander,
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
February 23-May 18, 2008.
America By Car,
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco,
February 14-April 26, 2008
The pickup is stopped somewhere in Haverstraw, New York. It's 1966, and you might guess it from the breadth of the steering wheel and the shape of the windshield. The driver is intent on the road ahead, but he's clearly not thinking of it. He might be fleeing a rough day of work, or he might be out to confront his two-timing girlfriend. As soon as the light changes, he could be reckless. It's hard to say. He's got the sun in his eyes. But then I realize the truck's not just stopped, it's parked—and that rectangular shadow on the hood resembles a camera. Now the man's expression makes me smile; he's just posing.
Casting himself in the fiction of the depiction, the photographer is at once honest and evasive. We can call it a self-portrait: the photographer has set up the camera and climbed in front of it. But in fully disclosing the set-up and reminding us of the artifice of the photograph (he's not really driving with the camera balanced on the hood), he refuses to unveil himself. We don't know much more about him from this portrait than that he's got a sense of humor. Perhaps he spends a lot of time at the wheel. I'm inclined to guess that look of absorption is real.
It's a young Lee Friedlander, in the years when his exacting wit is becoming claustrophobic. The parties are too crowded; there's always an arm or head blocking our view of the tittering couples we're trying to spy on. Instead of cityscapes, we find ourselves in front of glass storefronts staring at a reflection of the street laid over the faces inside. Instead of a wide open road or a river flowing out of the mountains or the yawning mouth of a ballpark, we're looking dead-on at telephone poles and suspension cables and still more backs of heads. I feel the need to jostle and crane to get a better view. But I can't move. Or rather, I keep moving my eyes around the picture to take in its parts, to imagine what I'm missing. I'd like to move past the frame to the subject, to these decades I never knew. But he keeps shutting me out, slamming me up against the flat surface of the photograph.
If seeing is a process of editing, of clipping and parsing the world so that what we think we see and what we remember seeing become neat and possible to organize—and sometimes to idealize or quite often to ignore —then photography can up-end all this. "Photography is the process of rendering observation self-conscious," wrote John Berger, just about the same year Friedlander was letting his own shadow creep into his photographs. Even when Friedlander is absent, we are aware of the photographer as a body in space, intervening in the scene. Where he literally appears, he is often just a haunting in the street or a partially obstructed reflection. In an essay accompanying Friedlander's first book, Self Portrait, John Szarkowski writes that with each picture in the series, it is impossible to pin down the "real" Friedlander: "One could think of these pictures not exactly as portraits but as sketches of tentative identities being tried out to see if they fit...new personae constructed out of the very process of photography." The camera, ever eager to deceive us about its capacity to reveal and disclose, is also a means of experimentation. The results are at turns flippant and silly, sometimes sardonic, and usually, ultimately, self-examining. If we're paying attention we can also discern the craftsman in time, reinventing a pictorial history.
He leaves his hometown of Aberdeen, Washington, at eighteen, already a resourceful self-made freelance photographer. He's got his Leica and the Omega D-2 enlarger he inherited from an older, eccentric pal. First he goes to Los Angeles, where he finds the Art Center School of Design a less than satisfactory challenge and drops out within a year. And then, barely over twenty, he arrives in New York. It's the middle Fifties and he's amidst a throng of freelance photographers competing for magazine work, including Robert Frank and a future lifelong friend, Garry Winogrand. By the time he's introduced into the Fortune closet office of Walker Evans, the man he'll adopt as a sort of mentor, he's already developed a rigorous work ethic and, more importantly perhaps, a tireless commitment to his education.
Jazz is in the background. Indeed, he's been following its disorderly squeaks and scuffles from Seattle to L.A. to New York. And all around him are surfaces for distortion, not just the lens but mirrors and windows, glass storefronts, eyeglasses, polished pianos, brass glinting in the night. Slowly he assembles his own fragmented portrait of modern life—an unstable one, always threatening to give way to the surreal.
I'm looking now at the suite of television screens in empty hotel rooms, and the framed picture of the Kennedys in a store window, and the one of a young Mickey Rooney. These are from a world that's still being colonized by images. They seem to me to have acquired a faintly vintage charm. I don't just mean that they are full of objects from the past, but that Friedlander's need to ironize what Susan Sontag called our "image-choked world" ages a little over the years. (Not that our cities and highways and private homes aren't still sticky under a great cobweb of iconography; not that we don't go on setting up rooms for human life and filling them with screens as companions.) As the years pass, I sense Friedlander growing at once more adventurous and also a little somber. The frustrated documenter, the tourist, the voyeur, the family man— always the boy fooling around with his equipment—uproots our assignations of beauty and sentimentalism, exposes our tendency to divide up a life and put it on display. I wonder if this is one of the reasons Friedlander must let himself into the image, to prove that the camera can also enlarge us.
I think of this standing before his most recent work, a series of photographs taken between 1997 and 2007, while Friedlander was traveling back and forth across the country.
The America in America By Car is at once a personal and remote place. The scenes are quiet and echoing: a lone tree on a well-watered lawn, a herd of cattle in a grass field, a car in an otherwise empty parking lot. They gather up forgotten objects: faded barns and turned-over trucks, a cowboy-shaped billboard stripped of its signage, a Gettysburg monument. It isn't an unsung landscape either literally or pictorially— these are subjects in Friedlander's past work and in the work of photographers who traveled the country in the Thirties and again in the Fifties. At a glance, the series could be an homage to road photography.
Even without their titles, we know these are contemporary journeys. All the scenes are caught in a sort of double frame made from the interior of a rental car. These interiors are clean and sterile. They almost reek of new-car. Some-times the majority of the photograph is just the window frame and the door, or the dashboard. Over the course of the series, something slowly begins to rankle. What is only banal and a little tiresome about looking at the rental becomes exhausting. Must we always be reminded that we are sitting in the car? Why can't we just lose ourselves in the unspooling highway and the prairie just beyond? It's more or less the same old question from the Sixties, rephrased.
We're never allowed to forget the photograph for the world it depicts. Peter Galassi, in his MOMA catalog essay, points out that when Friedlander switched from his 35 mm Leica to the Hasselblad Superwide, it allowed him to expand the field of view. So much interior wouldn't have been an option before. This excess of information is both playful and provoking. Ever on the lookout for equivalencies, Friedlander uses the car to find shapes and shadows that form loose affiliations of meaning. They're beautiful or clever or just simple: the line of the car window rolled halfway down, the line of its shadow inside the car, and the roofline of a barn make a band of arches.
But these optical tricks don't serve simply to remind us of where the photographer is positioned, how he is arranging and rearranging the field of view; they also equate the camera with the car itself. In the car, we travel in protected anonymity, voyeurs and consumers. We say we've seen the country when we've driven across it, but the roadside view— the tourist's point of view—is rather uniform. Perhaps this reminder is what is unsettling. Take the sort of self-congratulatory tone of the herd of cattle in "Nebraska 1999," caught and framed in the half-open passenger-side window. See what I found? the photographer seems to be saying to the viewer. We recognize ourselves in this gesture. And for a moment we feel congenially toward Friedlander, who thought to share this with us. The next photograph is similar. But this time it's a person in the window, an Alaskan park ranger standing next to the car. She's grinning from ear to ear, thrilled, it seems, to have her picture taken, and we might imagine she doesn't get a lot of company. This time the photograph makes me wince, reminding me of those cheap postcards with big pink lettering: Greetings from Alaska!
The photographer is aware of the way we try to hold on to (and often commodify) the places we visit and the places we're from. At the same time, like the car, the camera allows us to see more and see differently than we ever could without it, whatever its potential for molestation. For Friedlander, the camera has always been the best instrument of its own critique.
Sometimes the picture postcard scenes in America By Car are not the central subject of the photograph, but only embedded within it—in a side-view mirror, for example. This kind of collaged composition recalls the way Friedlander used the rearview mirror and the windshield in the Sixties and Seventies. In these photographs the fragmented landscapes challenged the traditional notions of perspective: a tree-lined horizon is broken by a row of houses, the back of a figure standing in the grass appears in the middle of an intersection. Now this use of collage evinces less of an interest in the representation of space, and more in how we are situated in time. In this way, Friedlander's mature work is more abstract.
In one of the few urban scenes, taken in New York City in 2002, the view is once again out the passenger-side window. A chaos of reflections appears in the city's infinite shiny surfaces. Just ahead is an old brick building. In the passing SUV we see its likeness arch and bend in an almost dreamlike prophecy of how it will someday fall. We seem to be zooming headlong into the changing future, transforming the world before our eyes. But in the embedded scene in the side-view mirror, the street is still upright, and there is a dark figure crossing it. In the backward glance is a simpler, more coherent past.
"Will the whole come back then?" Walt Whitman intones in Song for Occupations. "Can each see signs of the best by a look in the looking-glass? Is there nothing greater or more?" The whole is only ever behind us. These photographs intimate a certain resignation, an acceptance that at some moment in the course of our lives we settle into a certain seat— not that we can't go on examining our perspective, but we can't entirely change where and what we are.
There is only one frontal-view self-portrait in the series: it's different from the one in Haverstraw or indeed any of Friedlander's early portraits. It's more akin to the ones he's taken in the last two decades, where he comes up close to the lens. In this one, Friedlander is outside the car leaning in. He's wearing a T-shirt that says on it "Lee." He looks tired. He's got that give-me-a-break look: Are you really taking a picture of me? I feel as if I've unwittingly taken his place in the car, behind the viewfinder. But he won't let me get away with it. That's where I belong, he says.
Kathryn Crim is the deputy editor of The Threepenny Review.
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