Lee Friedlander
Lee Friedlander quit giving interviews a few years ago. This is one of his last. He did a video on book making that I'll add soon. Friedlander is a really funny guy, to my thinking. I laughed a lot reading the interview. J.P. Caponigro takes himself very seriously. Go have a look at his work. pkr
johnpaulcaponigro.com
Lee Friedlander, born in 1934 in Aberdeen, Washington, began photographing the American social landscape in 1948. His photographs bring to the surface the juxtapositions of everyday life that comprise our modern world. The awkward, offhanded “snapshot” quality of his work disguises its considerable sophistication. Beyond the vigorous outward eye he turns to the world around him, Friedlander is also recognized for an investigation of self he began in the 1960’s, reproduced in Lee Friedlander: Self Portrait. Many additional monographs on Friedlander’s work exist, among them, Like a One-Eyed Cat, Nudes, Lee Friedlander Photographs, Letter From the People, and The Desert Seen. Friedlander was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowships in 1960 and 1962 and an NEA individual fellowship in 1972. His work can be found in most of the major photographic collections internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitain Museum of Art, and the George Eastman House.
Learn more about the history of photography including individual artist's histories at
www.luminous-lint.com.
This conversation was first seen in the Aug/Sep. 2002, issue of Camera Arts magazine.
JPC What was it about photography that interested you enough to devote a lifetime to it?
LF Everything.
JPC Confirmation? Immediacy? Directness?
LF Directness. The fact that anything that has light on it can be exposed and becomes information. Unlike any other medium, you get the tree or the forest all at once. That is pretty amazing.
JPC It is! I like it because it’s a ticket to go out into the world and look, to look a little more closely than I ordinarily would, every waking minute.
LF You can’t make a picture in New York or Los Angeles without being there. You have to be there.
JPC This can be a very interesting idea. I think the truth value that we ascribe to the photographic document rests with the witness rather than the medium. Now, with new technologies, we are able to make photographs that don’t involve human witness—footage shot remotely off of robots, satellites, or missles.
LF Yeah, but it was still witnessed by the camera.
JPC Can a camera be a witness?
LF Why not?
JPC Well, I wonder if the camera can give us anything more than raw data as opposed to processed information. No meaning has been drawn out of a situation, consciously, without a witness. Rather than using the camera to confirm our experience, we might then be forced to go out and verify the camera’s experience. In our legal system a great deal of emphasis is placed on witnesses in addition to data. The type of document that a photojournalist or straight photographer includes implicit statements. I have seen this. Or at the very least, I have been there.
LF Photographs also show the way that the camera sees. It’s not just me or you or anybody else. The camera does something that is different from our own setting. I don’t know about you, but whenever I get a new camera, it might take years before it and I are really in tune.
JPC That’s a great point. It may be one of the reasons many photographers like to strip their equipment down to a single lens and camera. They learn to see the way it sees and use that to better portray the way they see.
LF If I am used to the camera and I know a scene, I know where to stop and look, because I am used to what it shows.
JPC And if you put another camera in your hands you would find a different place?
LF Yes. I never understood carrying four lenses and changing them all the time. That would drive me crazy.
JPC I like zoom lenses, they offer the versatility of more than one lens in a lens.
LF That would be even worse.
JPC You think?
LF For me it would be.
JPC I like the arrangement. If I’m standing on the edge of a cliff or with my back up against a wall, I don’t have to move to frame an image. But keeping it simple works best for you right now?
LF Yes.
JPC Always has?
LF Yes.
JPC You once wrote, “The camera is not merely a reflecting pool and the photographs are not exactly the mirror, mirror on the wall that speaks with a twisted tongue.”
LF It does sound right doesn’t it?
JPC It does. Do you think we get a reflection of what is our there, in here, or both?
LF I try to forget that one. It is part of learning how to jump over a hoop I suppose. I find that I don’t think much about photographing.
JPC Before, during or afterwards?
LF When I am making photographs. It’s just a physical reaction.
JPC I can appreciate that this might help side-step conventional ways of thinking and the concerns of ego.
LF Richard Benson said that if an idea bit me in the ass I still wouldn’t be able to recognize what it was.
JPC Until after the fact?
LF Not even that.
JPC You’ve had plenty of ideas spread out over a long career.
LF Anything that looks like an idea is probably just something that has accumulated, like dust. It looks like I have ideas because I do books that are all on the same subject. That is just because the pictures have piled up on that subject. Finally I realize that I am really interested in it. The pictures make me realize that I am interested in something.
JPC I like to let the work tell me what it is about and vicariously what I am about. It’s important to do the work spontaneously first, isn’t it?
LF As I say, I hardly ever think about doing work. I think about going somewhere that might interest me.
JPC I wanted to talk about self-portraiture. You’ve done some very interesting work in this vein. While photography can represent the way we see, it can also show us how we look. The photograph can be a mirror. What do you find particularly interesting about self-portraiture?
LF I was curious what I looked like in certain situations. I’m also curious what the photographs are going to look like, because you are not standing behind the viewfinder. One of the things that is curious is, are you able to do it? Are you going to hit the bull’s eye? It’s quite strange that it works. I once read about a Zen archer that looked at a rabbit running, turned his back, fired an arrow, and hit the rabbit. I suspect a little of that is true with photography.
JPC I think you’re right. That gets right back to the not thinking about the process while you engage in it. You just get in the way of yourself after all that practice. There may be a lot of thinking before and afterwards, but thinking about while you are doing it may produce problems.
LF I am not a big thinker. It keeps me out of mischief. Or it is the only mischief that I have.
JPC The self-portrait is very telling about both the photographer and photography itself. Give two people the same equipment and perhaps the same vantage point and it’s likely that they will come back with two different pictures.
LF Clearly.
JPC By turning the lens back on us, we highlight the subjective nature of photography. We can point the lens inward at the same time that we point it outward. Do you think that is true?
LF You can probably make me believe it.
