L.ee Friedlander was still a child when he took a picture of his uncle Vern next to his new car. But he was probably a good deal older than he realized how much more was to be seen in the photo than just the relative with the Hudson, namely: some of Aunt Mary’s laundry and her dog Beau Jack, who was at the fence peeed, plus a row of bulbous begonias and eighty-seven trees plus a million pebbles in the driveway. Photography, Friedlander recognized, is a very generous medium. And from then on he took full advantage of this generosity. Probably no other photographer has packed as much into his pictures as he does.
You are overflowing with information. Everything is interesting, Lee Friedlander makes it unmistakably clear to the viewer and not a little overwhelms him if he is not satisfied with the hustle and bustle in the streets full of people and cars, signs and posters, fences and sculptures, the telephone booths and facades of the Houses, but creates further perspectives through reflections in mirrors and shop windows, which cannot be deciphered at first glance and with the help of which he literally deepens the pictures layer by layer. And right in the middle of it himself. Sometimes as a mirror image, sometimes as his shadow, which seems to make itself as demonic as the doppelganger in the gloomy tales of romanticism, perhaps looking for a stop when it clings to lamp posts or over the fur collar of a passer-by hugs, but maybe also wants to tear away from this confusion, this maelstrom of life.
And at the same time he always refers to the role of the intruder, which he inevitably takes on as a photographer. When Lee Friedlander bundled the recordings into a small book in 1970, he titled it “Self Portrait”. As if he had found an equivalent for his own state of mind in these moments of everyday life.
Loneliness, longing, melancholy
Simply “Lee Friedlander” is the name of a presentation in the Berlin exhibition hall c / o – taken over by the Fundación Mapfre in Madrid – which, with around three hundred and fifty works from a good six decades, gives an overview of his work that has never been larger in Germany. The focus is on street images and self-portraits as the heart of Friedlander’s approach to the world – but also as perfect examples of how he not only struggles with his surroundings, but also repeatedly tests the possibilities of photographic art and photographic techniques and all the conventions of the goes beyond the classical rules of composition. In almost every one of his pictures a kind of antithesis to photography seems to be formulated.
His career began as well and conventionally as you would expect from a young, commercial photographer in the 1950s: with commissioned work. For him, these were portraits of jazz musicians for the record sleeves of the Atlantic label. Although he was only in his mid-twenties, he worked with the most important artists on the scene – from Aretha Franklin and Miles Davis to John Coltrane and Ray Charles. But more exciting are the pictures that he took for himself in hotel and motel rooms at the same time: of television sets running between bare furniture. A moment of social and media criticism merges with a feeling of loneliness, longing and melancholy. Love of life looks different. And yet Friedlander is far less a brooding than a lively photographer who escapes all theories and just searches. Looking for something new. “If you know the answer, why ask the question,” he summed up on occasion. And then he says about his pictures that they are all very amusing.
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