Crimson n clover, er whatever (Taken with instagram)
Mary, Big Jesus, Lil’ Jesus (Taken with instagram)
“There is nothing so mysterious as a fact clearly presented.” — Lisette Model
Photo by Lee Friedlander via This Public Address.
A friend likes to tell how his father, when asked to help fix or explain a problem on the farm where he grew up, would always respond, “Just look at it.” Lee generally says something like this when asked how his photographs work or why he made them. And he means it in the same spirit. First, if you don’t figure it out for yourself you will quickly forget what you discover and it won’t be of any use to you. And second, don’t use somebody else’s way of looking or you won’t see anything. To the close observer, Friedlander even builds in safeguards to keep his audience from seeing his way.
— Rod Slemmons, Lee Friedlander: Just Look At It
Photo: Lee Friedlander, Maria, Katonah, New York, 1972
![In writing about this book, I don’t attempt to discuss the photographs as photographs per se; I’m neither critic nor historian. But I cannot escape the fact that well over half my life has been lived under the medium’s umbrella. When Richard B. Woodward wrote on Lee in the 1989 Artnews, he referred to a photograph from 1970, taken in a Las Vegas motel room [this photo], of me standing in a block of light against a dark wall, with Lee’s shadow imposed on my body. For him the picture read “as a portrait of a marriage in which Lee’s photography has overshadowed both their lives.” In a way, all of these photographs, not just that one, were formed because photography did indeed overshadow all four of our lives. Lee can never stop looking, seeing, as the photographer he is, and his camera is never far from his hand. So during all our family moments, outdoors or sitting around our home, eating, reading, listening to music, or even combing our hair or playing with our dogs, all those small things we hardly thought about, Lee was always seeing something that in an instant he might need to frame and record.
Maybe this is how he handles that part of himself that doesn’t remember past details. He told me that once he has made a picture of something, he can forget the details because he knows he has them on film.I suspect that this need capture a moment seen only by him is now intensely ingrained in his persona. It started as he entered his teen years and he has never moved away from it, has actually grown into it more. Why this has happened I can only guess; maybe its his way of becoming more attached to what he sees, maybe having the camera at hand makes him feel more ready to deal with what he sees, maybe he isolates and simplifies the complexity of what he sees, maybe that makes life more manageable for him. What I can say for sure is that he cannot not take photographs.
— Maria Friedlander, “The All of It”, from Family by Lee Friedlander
Photo: Lee Friedlander, Minneapolis [Shadow Self-Portrait on Maria], 1966. via SFMOMA.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4l6dmQtRk1qaz6u3o1_500.jpg)
In writing about this book, I don’t attempt to discuss the photographs as photographs per se; I’m neither critic nor historian. But I cannot escape the fact that well over half my life has been lived under the medium’s umbrella. When Richard B. Woodward wrote on Lee in the 1989 Artnews, he referred to a photograph from 1970, taken in a Las Vegas motel room [this photo], of me standing in a block of light against a dark wall, with Lee’s shadow imposed on my body. For him the picture read “as a portrait of a marriage in which Lee’s photography has overshadowed both their lives.” In a way, all of these photographs, not just that one, were formed because photography did indeed overshadow all four of our lives. Lee can never stop looking, seeing, as the photographer he is, and his camera is never far from his hand. So during all our family moments, outdoors or sitting around our home, eating, reading, listening to music, or even combing our hair or playing with our dogs, all those small things we hardly thought about, Lee was always seeing something that in an instant he might need to frame and record.
Maybe this is how he handles that part of himself that doesn’t remember past details. He told me that once he has made a picture of something, he can forget the details because he knows he has them on film.
I suspect that this need capture a moment seen only by him is now intensely ingrained in his persona. It started as he entered his teen years and he has never moved away from it, has actually grown into it more. Why this has happened I can only guess; maybe its his way of becoming more attached to what he sees, maybe having the camera at hand makes him feel more ready to deal with what he sees, maybe he isolates and simplifies the complexity of what he sees, maybe that makes life more manageable for him. What I can say for sure is that he cannot not take photographs.
— Maria Friedlander, “The All of It”, from Family by Lee Friedlander
Photo: Lee Friedlander, Minneapolis [Shadow Self-Portrait on Maria], 1966. via SFMOMA.
“Give me anybody’s family album and I’ll find lots of interesting pictures.” — Lee Friedlander
Maria Friedlander in 1961 by Lee.
Hay baby (Taken with instagram)
Happy 71st birthday to the man who taught me that “rat race choir” rhymes with “society’s pliers”, Bob Dylan!!
Here he is walking along 5th Avenue near Central Park on February 10, 1965. He would release “Bringing It All Back Home” two months later, and freak out the folkie squares with his electric set at Newport that summer. Heady days for the dude from Dinkytown. Photo by Richard Avedon.
John, tell me the story of the fog (Taken with instagram)
John Horner: Forever Flippin Shit (Taken with instagram)
Ok I will (Taken with instagram)
Taken with instagram
I am a World Champion ‘86 Met, I enjoy knee socks, doing 110 on the BQE, and trainspotting.
Photo by this guy.
— A total fucking moron
— College educated woman with rectangular glasses enjoying a universally acclaimed TV show set in space