Lee Friedlander Anton, Saul
2015, 2015-08-28, 2016-02-22
eBook
An illustrated examination of an early photo-essay by Lee Friedlander that shows television screens broadcasting eerily glowing images into unoccupied rooms.
American photographer Lee Friedlander's photographs are often deemed to be unreadable. This critical assessment of his work is principally based on his manipulation of reflection, framing, and ...superimposition. This essay takes these manipulations as its subject. I suggest one method of reading the unreadable, focusing particularly on two self-portraits: Tallahassee, Florida 1969 and Madison, Wisconsin 1966. My approach weaves together the ideas of Jacques Lacan and Homi Bhabha. In the first section, I place Lacan's concept of the stain into dialogue with the recurring appearance of Friedlander's own shadow in his self-portraiture. In the second, I bring Bhabha into conversation with Lacan, showing crossovers in how they conceptualise reflections. I argue that Tallahassee and Madison visually articulate these crossovers. In the third, I use Bhabha's concept of doubling to approach the two photographs' delineation of the Lacanian gaze. In forging links between Friedlander, Lacan, and Bhabha, I propose two complementary ideas. The first is that Friedlander's photographs help to illustrate commonality between Lacan's and Bhabha's work. The second is that Lacan and Bhabha help us read Friedlander's often perplexing self-portraits. By expressing an absence of the self, these photographs comment on the impossibility of self-portraiture.
New York photographer Lee Friedlander has won the 2005 Hasselblad Award, one of photography's most prestigious prizes. The award comes with a $70,000 cash prize and gold medal, which will be ...presented at a ceremony in Sweden on Nov 19. Friedlander, 71, belongs to an elite group of American photographers--Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Helen Levitt among them--who have pushed the boundaries of documentary photography.
Crisscrossing the country over the past 15 years, Mr. Friedlander shot photographs from inside the car, usually through the windshield or the two front side windows, in ways that included the window ...frames. Because he has a very sophisticated sense of composition, and a great sense of visual wit, this devise doesn't become boring.
