Original Blog post: http://simonjohnsondissertation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/self-portrait-photographs-by-lee.html
Self Portrait: Photographs By Lee Friedlander
Afterword by John Szarkowski
p. by the museum of modern art
1970
Quoted by Friedlander, new city, new york, feb 1970
-Self portraits span 6 years
"and were not done as a specific preoccupation, but rather, they happened as a peripheral extension of my work."
so not consciously aware of what he was doing, it seems? However, every photographer is conscious of the editing process selection, creation of the book etc... so not completely unconscious decisions go into these things.
"I might call myself an intruder. At any rate, they came about slowly and not with plan but more as another discovery each time."
"I suspect it is for one's self-interest that one looks at one's surroundings and one's self. This search is personally born and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs."
"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. Witness is borne and puzzles come together at the photographic moment which is very simple and complete. The mind-finger presses the release on the silly machine and it stops time and holds what its jaws can encompass and what the light will stain. That moment when the landscape speaks to the observer."
interpret this as thing being manipulated or being truthful
General observations on his self-portraits:
breaks general conventions of photography
-reflected photographer in windows
-shadows of the photographer in the shot
-seen in the mirror, revealling the camera, breaking the illusion
22 Louisiana 1968
implied leering, presence of observation...
27 new york city 1966
same, stalkery
The Friedlander Self, by John Szarkoski (4 pages of text)
first page
-talks about the ease of self-portraiture
"the obvious disadvantage of the self as subject is the fact that it inevitably raises the issue of conflict of interest. When the artist is also the subject, wearing two hates at once, is he (she) first of all the servant of historic and artistic justice, or the agent of self-advancement?"
Talking about the bias that is offered to the photographer, this could be a more general statement
"Albrecht Durer who appears in his own pictures as only marginally less spiritually beautiful than Christ himself, whereas the artist's brother Hans appears to be just another calculating northerner."
LOOK AT HIM. Very biased and conscious of it?
"Even Vincent Van Gogh, showing himself with his head swathed in the great white bandage, the visible badge of his folly, paints himself as an exemplary-as a radiant-fool, not to be confused with all those other uncounted fools who also sent their severed ears to whores and afterwards painted their self-portraits badly, or not at all.
Interesting... add this back into chapter 2 VAN GOGH after thinking about it.
-Rembrandt portraits
"Only a dunce or knave would compare the work of one of the greatest of the dead painters to the work of any photographer, much less one still in excellent health, like Friedlander, and I must emphasize here that I am not really comparing their work, certainly not comparing their brushwork or anything of that sort, but merely suggesting that there might be some interesting point of similarity in their attitudes, which allows them both to look at their own selves with such remarkable and rare disinterest."
-list of best self-portraits
"perhaps it would be more useful not to think of these pictures as portraits at all, but as landscapes, of a variety that Friedlander was perhaps the first to call....social landscapes."
clear or vague impression of Friedlander..... "or some other thick or thin slice or suggestion of him should perhaps not be regarded as a description of his true character, or his person, or even his public persona, but simply as a kind of identifying mark-something similar to a signature, or a fingerprint, or a royal seal, that indicates that he, Friedlander, a reliable witness (like Kilroy) was there, and testifies to the precise, objective accuracy of the report he is giving us."
not identity but a signifier to some identitifying mark.... still a representation is it not? A signpost to Friedlander?
"One could think of these pictures not exactly as portraits but as sketches of tentative identities being tried out to see if they fit, in which case they might be adopted as more or less permanent roles and obligations."
interesting, to think of them in another way than self-portraits and that the self isn't something that is accurate, but more the opposite/
STILL, there has been conscious choice in this construction of portraits is there not
ALSO, I don't haave to take this view as truth I can obviously disagree with it
"In the Friedlander pictures the fictional identities are not attached to older historical or literary characters, but are new peronae constructed of the very process of photography. In this sense they might be profitably compared to the fictional self-portraits of Cindy Sherman, which are similar in the sense that both photographers are interested in the exploration of roles, but dissimilar in the sense that for Sherman the roles would appear to be designed in the mind, like advertisements, and then realised by the means of photography, whereas for Friedlander one cannot properly think of the idea in the absece of, or distinct from, the photograph in which it is embedded"
comparison with Sherman... meaning??
* * *
Friedlander at a conference, had nothing to say about his images.
360 pictures as slides
brave person asked where one was made
Friedlander continued to tell the place where every one was made
Was asked if it was relevant where they were taken
"Friedlander considered the question for a moment and, wit a respectful seriousness of manner that I have no reason to belive feigned, said yes, he thought it was relevant that the piture had been made in Chattanooga, because if he (Friedlander) had not been in that city he would not have been able to make that picture."
* * *
"Similarly, if he was not Lee Friedlander he would not have been able to make these portraits. Lee Friedlander is the person who made these pictures"
"Friedlander's so-called self-portraits can also be seen in this light, as pictures that are determined to conceal the fact that artists' lives are more interesting than other lives."
"What is the main subject of these pictures? Or perhaos that question is too broad and difficult, and should be broken down into two narrower and easier questions; first, who is the subject of these pictures? And second, what else is their subject?"
-first Q is straightforward. the who has changed continually, mailman, rapist, salesman. roles.
"These roles, although obviously based on fact, were not taken too seriously as truth; it was rather as though an inventive, high spirited child had found the key to the little room behind the library, where the pattern book of human types is kept, and proceeded to revise the book using it for his design bits and pieces of the real world."
shifted to new ground (the who)
first noticed in 'canyon de chelly arizona' ...
"and that what I was now looking at was not an artistic invention but the real Friedlander, the man himself, part cowboy and part con man, but mostly witch doctor......"
"Or, alternatively, I was mistaken earlier, and all those earlier whos were also the real Friedlander. Or perhaps I am mistaken now, and the fact is that Friedlander has become a more skillful poseur."
dependent on writings themselves, and writings by other people of them for an subjective or objective (or so we assume... at this point)
second question... a false dichotomy, red herring
"Let us call it a photograph, an example of that species of picture that attempts to produce the illusion of clear meaning by recording the image on a camera's screen. One can produce this illusion even with the simplest of materials, even with subject matter that we carry always with us. Or perhaps these materials are not so simple as they seem. It has surely been pointed out that the fisherman, no matter how carefully he studies its deeps and shallows, never fishes the same river twice."
Simon Johnson
www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk
Re-read - Lee Friedlander Self-portrait
Posts
