A few weeks ago, I stopped by the Met to check out their “Photography On Photography” show. While it was fine, I was more impressed with another show that I stumbled into while I was there: Lee Friedlander’s Olmstead Park commissions. The Times review that appeared in January was mildly interesting (especially the way it frames Olmstead as a proto-conceptual artist whose works Friedlander is photographing), but I don’t think it really gets at the heart of the show.
Most park photography–and Central Park photography especially–leaves me cold. Bruce Davidson did a fine job on Central Park, but since then I’ve felt that every photographer who chooses the park as a subject owes any success more to the public’s vague feelings of love and nostalgia toward the park than to actual merit. I was afraid that Lee Friedlander, the man who brought humor to high-art photography before humor became a staple of high art, would just be loping along after Davidson in his old age.
I was wrong. Friedlander’s work is wonderfully fresh. The Times mentions Friedlander’s desire to fill up the frame, and Olmstead’s hatred of perfectly groomed “natural spaces,” but the combination of their aesthetics makes for something new. Friedlander crams his frames with what most photographers would consider undesirables–all the twiggy brambles and obscuring leaves that get in the way of the typical “good picture.” This loving attention to the weeds and brambles feels like one of the more honest tributes to Olmstead’s aesthetics that I’ve ever seen. The work becomes even richer in the context of Friedlander’s older photographs. In “Ramble,” he’s using the same compositional style he became known for back in the 1960s for his self portraits. In those images, Friedlander playfully projected his own reflection or shadow onto everything he was photographing, resulting in a hysterically narcissistic comment on the way photographers approach the world. The Olmstead park images are saturated with twigs, grass, and trees where anyone familiar with Friedlander’s work might expect a shadow of the photographer to appear–but it never does. It’s like Friedlander is telling us a time-worn but beloved joke, and leaving us to fill in the punchline.
I was so enamored of Friedlander’s unique take on the parks that I thought seriously about buying the book. Unfortunately, it doesn’t pack the punch of the show. Many of Friedlander’s nicest pictures are close-ups of trees that look like chubby hands and torsos, or similar elements from various parks. In the show, these photographs are interspersed with other pictures of bridges, fields, leaves, etc. In the book, however, many spreads plug multiple photos of things like trees into rows, lending these sequences a typological aspect that really diminishes the power of each individual image. Any further intention I had to buy the book was quashed by the $85 price tag. Sadly, the show closed last weekend–so the book is the closest you can get to seeing Friedlander’s works as they were artfully arranged by the Met curatorial staff.
Images © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery.
