Whatever it was that set Lee Friedlander off taking photos several thousand years ago but he has been a non-stop image making machine ever since. Probable influences were books by Atget, Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank - and a love of jazz. The best of his photographs look noisy - almost insanely so when considered against the cool Dusseldorf/New Topographics minimalist style that soon came to be accepted as the preferred manner of contemporary art photography. Friedlander remains pretty much another of those photographer's photographer like Winogrand and Eggleston.
His approach of have camera-will photograph stuff - is usually overlooked by non-photography educated curators who find it awkward to interpret and easy to dismiss. The all important bigger meaning is obscure although, ironically enough, obscuring is one of the essential devices that Friedlander employs again and again. Old school observational photography just seems too rough and ready, too intuitive, and just too haphazard - maybe even too much fun - when in reality it speaks eloquently, often stridently, of both US socio-political history and personal issues of identity and is just as thought-provoking as any constructed, overtly concept-based image-making. The problem for many art curators may be that it's too much like jazz and not enough like classical.
His approach of have camera-will photograph stuff - is usually overlooked by non-photography educated curators who find it awkward to interpret and easy to dismiss. The all important bigger meaning is obscure although, ironically enough, obscuring is one of the essential devices that Friedlander employs again and again. Old school observational photography just seems too rough and ready, too intuitive, and just too haphazard - maybe even too much fun - when in reality it speaks eloquently, often stridently, of both US socio-political history and personal issues of identity and is just as thought-provoking as any constructed, overtly concept-based image-making. The problem for many art curators may be that it's too much like jazz and not enough like classical.
