Peter Galassi's monstrous Lee Friedlander catalog arrived in the mail this morning, a book so big that it barely fits into my backpack, and one too large to comfortably browse on either the bus or Skytrain.

Friedlander is a photographer I've often thought about, but never looked closely at; since beginning to make pictures, I find myself studying him (& Frank Stella!) more and more. Friedlander's best pictures are incredibly complex; they fragment, re-compose and reanimate space, taking full advantage of the fact that a camera's lens is not a human eye in order to obtain "views" (through spatial compression; through the overlapping of distinct visual fields) exceeding those available to binocular vision.

Miami, Florida (1999), fig.56 in the Galassi catalog, is a photograph I would kill to make. Its spatial effects stun me (the wires and ribbon that "knit" its composition together; a piece of plastic mesh that pivots in space at lower right like the edge of one of Stella's huge constructions). But its "subject" -- what it depicts -- is plain; inelegant; "unartistic." A construction sawhorse; wire mesh; chainlink; a gunmetal mailbox; crumbly dry soil. A catalog of nouns, held together by the sparest of means.

Galassi's essay is, unusually for contemporary art writing, totally uncontaminated by jargon and theory. I found myself repeatedly nodding as I read along.

Peter Galassi:

"Friedlander's early maturity is witty but willful, adamant that the photograph is first and foremost a picture: a thing that he made. The force and vitality of this demand recovered the momentum of modernism, whose legacy the provincial photographer then still knew only dimly -- a reminder that the direct path of influence is only part of photography's dialogue with the past. But Friedlander set out to master photography's slumbering record of creative invention, and his interest in what had been done fueled his desire to see what he could do. Rooted in his alert wanderings near and far, his work became enriched by his persistent poking around in the pictorial past. This lively exchange began to yield sly winks of competition, open affirmations of homage, and a playful variety of other echoes and inflections that invite us to regard tradition as a very busy two-way street."
- posted by cjb @ 8:31 PM