Lee Friedlander speaks

[David Allen]

I have been a long admirer of Friedlander's work (especially up to the fifth book before the deluge of his books hit the market).

I have also always liked the fact that he almost never does interviews.

So surprise surprise here he is on a (not particularly riveting) podium discussion - the first time I have ever heard his voice!

https://vimeo.com/121486362

Bests,

David.
www.dsallen.de

 

[lauffray]

Thanks for the video, always nice to hear the voices of such legends

Btw I dropped by your website, tolle Bilder

 

[Black Dog]

Thanks for posting that!

 

[Sirius Glass]

Thanks

 

[David Allen]

Thanks for the video, always nice to hear the voices of such legends

Btw I dropped by your website, tolle Bilder

Thank you very much.

It is always very heartening to get positive feedback and yes, it is always interesting to hear what people sound like when you have admired them for so long.

I particularly liked his reason for getting into book making - "it has become my medium because I must have looked at Evans' book thousands of times and always find something new" also his colleague's comment about young photographers who always (driven by universities methinks) think that they need to have a 'project' rather than doing what he does which is to photograph things and THEN notice that works come together as a book (project). Surely the act of photographing things (i.e. photographing things that attract you for some unknown reason) and then identifying what subjects/themes interest you is the 'photographic' way of working - by which I mean you are driven by what you choose to photograph rather than some 'concept' is the purest way to advance your work.

For me the 'revolution point' came very slowly. First I saw Ray Moore's book and was very interested but also perplexed - it was so different from what I knew from Camera Clubs, salons, the RPS gang and others. Then there was John Blakemore who embodied all of the West coast aesthetic but within our subdued landscape and weather and in the other camp (with all bells raging) was the new direction led by Victor Burgin that put theory at the forefront and (at least in my mind) creativity in terms of developing an 'artistic voice' on the total back burner. Then Peter Turner published a short essay of works by Friedlander in Creative Camera (my 'Bible' in the late 1970s) and then came the 1996 exhibition at the ICA London. Wow, that was the point that I comprehended how far amateur photography in the UK was divorced from the new developments in photography as a medium and I was not only hooked but wanted to take these ideas forwards.

This was within the context that, in my case, I had experimented with traditional landscape photography (being at the time a 110% West coast landscape photography fan despite the problems of working in this style in grey old Britain), the whole gamut of commercial photography, portrait orientated work, staged photography, street photography, etc. By total fluke I ended up in Berlin 3 days before the wall was opened. Thereafter, our arts organisation in London (www.cgplondon.org) started a ten-year art and artists exchange project with the area that I now live in. Slowly, very slowly I developed (through very many visits to the city) a new way of photographing cities that has led to a body of work that I now (albeit very late in the day) realise is a kind of collection of typologies photographed in a certain manner. This has some connection to the school of photography developed by Bernd and Hilla Becher but, importantly for me, does not pretend to be 'neutral' recording of such typologies but, rather, the opposite in the sense that I want it abundantly clear that I am the author (using angles, framing, contrast, shadows, etc) more drawn from that fleeting period of experimental photography and art in general during the immediate post-revolution period of the USSR.

Ha Ha, now I am sounding like all the theorists that I hate!

Back to Friedlander, what inspired me the most was not any individual image but his acceptance of the photographic 'failings' of his images and his exploitation of them to develop his photographic vocabulary.

I know from previous threads, that there are just as many people on this site who think he is a charlatan as a great photographer, but I for one consider him to be one of the 'greats' in photography. Despite the short and rather uninspiring quality of this little video, I think that it would be interesting to hear what others make of his work and what he had to say.

Bests,

David.
www.dsallen.de

 

[Arvee]

I attended a lecture/slide show that Lee presented at the Center for Photography at the University of Arizona when I was a member. Not very many people attended and when he finished his presentation, he came out into the lobby and had an informal Q and A/friendly chat with the folks for about 45 minutes. Very interesting fellow and quite personable.

 

[michaelorr]

1. My Granddad, a professor at Indiana State University (ISU) created the department of special education there. His lecture to me when i was a high school senior was understanding the levels of higher education BS, MS, and PHD. Bull----, More ---, and Piled High and Deep. That Yale dean was just way the HE-- fill in the blanks too thugish and biased against projects, stifling how photographers may arrive at a desirable result. Lee, on the other hand, was far more relaxed, and even the moderator pointed out that he (Lee) recognized he was photographing monuments and concentrated on that for a while. I guess the dean has proven my grandfather right. If the dean were grading someones work turned in at class, i am sure he would have had a checklist next to him and would have subtracted 33.3 points for a project. How utterly limiting and constricting and stifling can an educator be??? I have several projects, all which have found me, not the other way around. Last summer, i took my 8x10 on a lark to the White Mountains to shoot some waterfalls. Why? I have in that place hiked many peaks and many trails, and the waterfalls were so nice, and so when i went to do another peak bagging trip, i carved out some time to take up a few waterfalls with 8x10 i had not yet seen. It is now my desire to do more of the waterfalls there, inspired by the ones i photographed, the ones i hiked by and said "i would love to lug my LF camera up here and photograph this falls and basin" and one i have found here in APUG of the Diana's Baths. And there is the 150+ years old barn nearby, i have been admiring for 30+ years. A special place in the heart and emotion of my wife's mother, who played on that farm as a child, and a building i have long admired but never took up to photograph. I am not a photographer, by vocation, so i don't have the luxury of shooting every day anywhere i may find myself. But i do agree with a rather less hard-ass take on advice that i should have a camera with me much more often, even if in roll film format, and shoot. But one doesn't have to get all "professor hard-ass" about it, unless the schooling is from the economics department (selling books) rather that the fine arts department (creating nice images). What a crock of beans from the deans.

2. The advice given in the one and only question from the audience that was in this clip - go to work at the next sunrise - is about as high importance as any advice can be. i think the moderator was right at leaving the discussion on that advice, because nothing more could be said that could make a difference in anyone's photographing.

3. I was mostly impressed in this clip by Lee's point "there is a lot to learn in that book" meaning HE - Lee, learned a lot from the Evans book. And he stressed that the learning and seeing new things in those photographs never ends. Now, from a master, a real master, that is a profound example to every person who takes photographs (not snappies).

David Allen, thank you! >michaelorr

 

[Dennis S]

Great talk. Loved the "no project" method. Like him I have a camera (maybe not flash) with me 99% of the time.

 

[DREW WILEY]

I've always found his work just a little too self-consciously artsy or perhaps pretentious. Or maybe he did that deliberately. Certainly some of
his work has a tongue-in-cheek nuance to it. But it does drive conversation.

 

[Rich Ullsmith]

Thanks for posting. OP pointed it out, this was an opportunity squandered.

 

[ParkerSmithPhoto]

"... a lot of young photographers think they have to have a project, and this is very weird. Because it's as though what you're interested in is this idea of what you're going to do rather than what you do. One of the great lessons from Lee [Friedlander] to me has been this voracious appetite and love of the photograph and understanding that there's a wisdom in the photographs that flow out of him that tells his mind what's interesting."

Richard Benson really nailed it here. This is a result of the "academic photography" mindset, this idea that you always have to be fully conscious of every second and every detail you photograph, rather than using photography as a means of discovery, as Friedlander put it. In photo school you always have to explain yourself, as if everything can be reduced to some stupid concept, as if everything were to be fully known before you release the shutter. At best you end up with the kind of arid conceptual work that is currently the bees knees. At worst, you end up so frozen that you simply can't make a photo. I've met too many young photographers that have that affliction.

The joy of photography for me is to have an impulse, to photograph it, then to marvel at what it was that I captured yet somehow could not fully perceive in the moment, the rightness and the magic of the world.

 

[Sirius Glass]

+1

Just be yourself. Follow your impulses.

 

[MattKing]

I'm going to differ on this.

Projects are a really good idea. However, photographing only for projects is a bad idea.

If you have a few projects in mind, it motivates you to think photographically even when you don't have a camera in your hands. It also encourages you to go out and look for particular things.

The trick is to be open to other things when you encounter them.

One of the challenges is for projects to be successful, you have to be willing to let them evolve. A written description of a project's goals (and it is imperative to write those goals down) should be written in pencil, because as you work on a project you are quite likely to make discoveries that may have an affect on the final goals.

 

[Sirius Glass]

Projects are a good idea. I have given myself projects. It concept that one MUST have a project every time is over done. That was the point in the video.

 

[removed account4]

thanks david !

==
interesting conversation about projects &c.
some like rigid structure some don't ... some like open endedness, some don't
as mr friedlander said, people work in different ways..

 

[ParkerSmithPhoto]

Projects are a good idea. I have given myself projects. It concept that one MUST have a project every time is over done. That was the point in the video.

I think Lee was expressing this desire to just go out and photograph and see what happens, and upon reviewing his work, to find a narrative of what truly interests him and then to follow that thread. This is an organic method where you keep the horse in front of the cart.

I'm amazed at the pressure put on very young photography/art students to have fully refined ideas and conceptual foundations for their work, before they've even created it, as if they were artists who had been working for decades. There's no play, no allowance for the joy of discovery. I had one assistant who was simply frozen in place by these expectations. I myself admit to passing through similar periods.

Consider "The Decisive Moment": there is no theory, no concept, none of this silliness which predates the exposure. There is simply the moment, the experience, the reaction. The Buddha would have loved Cartier-Bresson and Elliott Erwitt (whom I am increasingly learning to appreciate as our most human photographer).

 

[David Allen]

bump

 

[Black Dog]

I think Lee was expressing this desire to just go out and photograph and see what happens, and upon reviewing his work, to find a narrative of what truly interests him and then to follow that thread. This is an organic method where you keep the horse in front of the cart.

I'm amazed at the pressure put on very young photography/art students to have fully refined ideas and conceptual foundations for their work, before they've even created it, as if they were artists who had been working for decades. There's no play, no allowance for the joy of discovery. I had one assistant who was simply frozen in place by these expectations. I myself admit to passing through similar periods.

Consider "The Decisive Moment": there is no theory, no concept, none of this silliness which predates the exposure. There is simply the moment, the experience, the reaction. The Buddha would have loved Cartier-Bresson and Elliott Erwitt (whom I am increasingly learning to appreciate as our most human photographer).

IIRC HCB was profoundly influenced by Zen Buddhism, as well as Surrealism [100% agree with your comments above by the way].