"HOMAGE" TO A PHOTOGRAPHER THAT I DON'T UNDERSTAND AT ALL.
Here's something I think about, a lot. When someone makes art that's niche-popular, in a certain time period, does the process automatically confer elevated "artist" status for the artist and the work for all time? If we thought an approach to art was new and innovative in 1965 are we duty bound to maintain our appreciation for that piece or portfolio for as long as we may live? Or do some pieces not rise to the lofty heavenly tier of art which allows them to be declared timeless?
Using everyday fashion as an analogy we have some sort of consensus that fashion is temporally contextual. What's "in" this year is not necessarily something that has continued art of fashion value as the months and years roll onward. Some pieces rise above the general marketplace of art and defy the academic idea that fashion is more transitory than the other arts. An example is the Chanel, little black dress. If there was not a general decay in aesthetic value assessment that clicked in after the shock value of the newness wears off most fashions we'd be flooded with a confusing and unfathomable infinity of daily choices before we even leave our houses. And we'd live in a nauseating kaleidoscope of endless trash fashion.
Do you remember elephant leg pants? How about bell bottom blue jeans? Puffy sleeved pirate shirts? Platform shoes? Mutton chops? Nehru shirts? How about culotte shorts for men? Don't ever want to admit that, right? How about droopy, bright bow ties? Ascots? Or the blue collar version = Dickies? And then there are the colors that come in and out of fashion. Sure, in one form or another fashions seem to come back around ---- but they are changed and morph into something new. Just ask the guy who invented the piano keyboard necktie.
My point being that all these things were popular in their moments and then were bypassed or dethroned by newer stuff that is or was more contemporarily popular and coveted. When the newness wore off the perceived value declined.
I'll stop belaboring my point. There is a photographer who has been around since at least the 1960s, anointed along with Garry Winogrand by the great "Oz" of museum curators, John Szarkowski, and rampantly published because of that, and I have to admit that I have absolutely no idea why people in our current time continue to find some sort of deep artistic value in his work. Unless it's the counterintuitive worship of drollness. And that would be photographer, Lee Friedlander.
Oh, I've tried hard to catch even a whiff of appreciation for his work and even went so far as to purchase a first edition copy of what many claim to the best book of his work, "Like a One Eyed Cat." But after many wasted hours staring at the amazingly banal and non-riveting images packaged between the covers I have to confess that I can only vaguely remember one or two images from the entire collection of photographs that held my attention for more than a moment, or were tattooed into my image-oriented brain. In the book of a real contemporary master of the same era, Robert Frank's, The Americans, are featured energy-charged images at the turn of every page. indelibly printed on my memory.
In the same time period Richard Avedon was cranking out absolutely riveting images that grow in influence with the passage of time. But Friedlander's street photography, or documentation of bad motel rooms, while perhaps striking because that style of work had never been done before, are relegated by the passage of time to rusty visual anecdotes of a time in the past when you could point a camera at anything and people were so amazed that the images were in focus or adequately exposed that the very provenance would provide an audience. And banality fit nicely into the wheelhouse of anti-establishment types who considered Jack Kerouac's book, On the Road, to be a bible of the times. "Taste-makers" ruled the roost and provided their services as gatekeepers and cultural guides for a number of generations. If J.S. at the MOMA liked "it" then I guess "it" had to be good. Right? Epatez les Bourgeoisie by overwhelming them with images of nothing at all.
We may come to hate Szarkowski, in an art historical sense, for pushing a number of mundane "talents" into the front of the stage while crowding out many substantial visionaries who, for lack of social entree, missed the unearned gift of annointment. The active push toward the limelights of lesser talents also included the turbo boosting of an unproven Stephen Shore, and now his protege in spirit, Alec Soth. Among the many other mundane photographers who had the ear (and the purse) of the emperor.
My point here is not that there weren't reasons to regards some work as fresh, in the moment, but if it doesn't wear well are we really obligated to pretend that it still moves us in some intellectual or even visceral way? Can't some work just politely evaporate over time without destroying our ability to enjoy photographic art in general?
I asked two people who professed to "enjoy" Friedlander's work immensely to explain their reasons and neither could give me any thoughtful underpinnings to understand his oeuvre. Nor could they come up with more than "it's largely a matter of taste" or some other dodge. My least favorite explanation is that he put the "spotlight" on the mundanity of everyday American existence. Tough for him that Robert Frank beat him to the punch by ten years and actually did it so well.
Though I knew Garry Winogrand well enough, personally, and followed his work over the years; even buying his books, there is something in the early documentary work by the art elite of black and white, 35mm photographers in his circle, all contemporaries of each other, that just continues to lose value with the passage of time. Sure, they have their greatest hits but even those hits are "smaller art" that leaves only a vague residue in the mind after viewing. No epiphanies and certainly no revelations.
We already knew that 1960's motel rooms in small towns were depressing. We already knew that there are weeds at the edges of parking lots. But flatly printed, small, black and white remembrances of time misspent in random self isolation hardly seems to be the backbone of a worthy art practice.
Back to my question, because a style of art becomes popular for a time, amongst a small but influential group, do we have some sort of obligation to keep the works on life support as they progressively diminish themselves in our collective culture? And was most of the work any good to begin with?
Or was it a classic case of "the Emperor has no clothes" with the emperor being Szarkowski and the clothes being any long term or intrinsic value to several well served photographer's work? Even the direct blessing of a famous curator doesn't automatically imbue art with lasting and collectively recognized value.
I have nothing against Lee Friedlander or his well executed plan to avoid a 9-5 job and instead roam around a country having fun shooting random images with his Leica cameras. Hell, I do the same thing and I would never expect that someone will bless the work with the wand of authority. I think he's pretty much a business genius. But a top tier, world changing photographer? Hmm.
I could be totally wrong about all this. L.F. could have been making genius works of art all along. In one sense I hope that's exactly what's been happening instead of my portrayal. But if I do happen to be wrong; demonstrably wrong! I sure hope someone can, without an ad hominem attack, correct me by way of a good, solid explanation of what has so far eluded me for well over 40 years of trying. Why is the work good? What makes it special?
Then maybe we can move on to a cogent and profound explanation of Alec Soth's work. That might be even harder... Let the slings and arrows fly.
I don't get Friedlander either, or Winogrand, or Shore. Every time one of them comes up in discussion I have to re-Google them to see their photos because none stick in my memory. To me, they are like looking at a random selection of tourist snapshots. The one thing that comes to mind, particularly with Shore, is that they were deliberately avoiding the appearance of following 'the rules' of photography. In that, they succeeded IMO. They also succeeded in making mundane, even boring images.
ReplyDeleteStreet photography, or social commentary photography as some call it, is difficult. Winogrand's approach was somewhat like the sports photographer who shoots thousands of images in hope of getting a 'good one' but IMO he wasn't a good editor of his profusion. I once went on a tall ship cruise and the captain, in an effort to make conversation while I was shooting, told me he admired Winogrand's work. I asked why, and his reply was that he shot hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of photos and had hundreds of rolls of undeveloped film when he died. Nothing about the quality or content of the work. His reply reminded me of an art history lecture in college during which one student pointed out that Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chaple lying on his back on a scaffold and the instructor retorted that it was the work itself that made it great, not the difficulty of doing it. Had it been mediocre, it would likely have been painted over by another artist later. and Michelangelo would be forgotten.
Sadly, IMO the art world has been 'dumbed down' and it accepts all sorts of things as 'innovation' which are really mundane., Friedlander among them
Thanks Jim, I knew Winogrand when he was a visiting instructor at UT Austin. He shot a lot. Mostly of cute young college women in the streets just off campus. He was no better or worse at it than the students. We also ran into each other at the audio shop where I worked part time while a student. He was always congenial. A decent human but, to my mind, a median photographer with an overly promiscuous shutter finger.
Delete"overly promiscuous shutter finger." that's my photographs in a nutshell :-) ROFL
ReplyDeleteI started developing an interest in photography around 1980. Magazines that were mostly gear-focused also used to tout certain photographers - Gary Winogrand and Lee Friedlander among them. I never cared very much for their work. Ansel Adams, Yousef Karsh, Henri Cartier Bresson, Neil Leifer, David Burnett, and Douglas Kirkland were more interesting to me. I guess we all have our own tastes in photography. I cracked up when I read the line about Winogrand’s “overly promiscuous shutter finger”.
ReplyDeleteBut, Kirk. Do you not recognize that your own photos follow the same general path as Friedlander's?
ReplyDeleteWe all are influenced by those who came before us. And most of the time we don't realize it. We just do what we do.
Gotta agree on Soth, however. Can't get into him at all. Shore? He's more like a painter than a photographer. Trying to elevate mundane things to Art. But sometimes it's best to get off the elevator and leave them as the boring bits they are. A urinal is, after all, still a urinal.
Frank? Even though he never did anything as great as "The Americans", no one can blaspheme his name. Winogrand? I like his work but it reminds me of the old saw involving monkeys, typewriters and time.
It's all good.
"But, Kirk. Do you not recognize that your own photos follow the same general path as Friedlander's?" OUCH. But...Okay.
DeleteI like a few of Friedlander's photos, but basically, I could get along without them. Any of them. You might be interested in a door-stop-sized tome called "Art: A New History" by a guy named Paul Johnson. It's a pretty idiosyncratic history, since he seems to leave out a lot of famous (and extremely good) artists, while giving pages to people who are at best second-rate. So he's controversial, but the most controversial section of the book is near the end, which he refers to as the rise of fashion art, which really begins with Picasso. He suggests that fashion art depends on exactly what all "fashion" depends on -- usually rich or well-placed people we now call "influencers." He argues that most 20th century art has no particular "art" value -- it's mostly art adopted by the richie-riches, just as they would adapt Hermes or Rolex, as something to show off and use to demonstrate their social status. Artists now don't chase after a vision, they chase after money and social position. Carl Andre, the well-known minimalist artist, was well-known in advanced art circles before he had actually made any art. (When he did make it, it consisted of a pile of fire bricks.) I think some of the photographers you mention fall into that category -- they're famous because they made famous friends. IMHO.
ReplyDeleteI must confess that most of my appreciation for Friedlander was because of an instructor for the lone photo class I took in college who told us he was great. But I pretty much quit following him after I heard about and saw a few images from a 1980 Friedlander exhibit titled "Trees and Brush". A reviewer went on and on about what he did with such a subject. I was not convinced. Now that I'm 70 I'm more careful about how I spend my time.
ReplyDeleteI do like some of Soth's portraiture.
My sense is that the pictures look more exotic if you are a big city critic than if you are familiar with the local and culture. The Last Picture Show, especially the book, was like a documentary on small town Texas life in the period. A lot of the critics saw it as almost surrealism. Maybe that is the point - universal art is rare. It speaks to different people. Time and place also matter. Eggleston was radical and interesting at the beginning, but it was a one time trick, at least for me. Friedlander as well. Then there are the brilliant commercial photographers such as Art Kate and Jay Maisel and many others who are not seen as part of the art world. Ironically, WeeGee has been picked up by the art world, decades too late to do him any good.
ReplyDeleteI think Jay Maisel desires attention as an artist although I confess that my view is probably biased because I have a similar approach to what he would call his personal work. I wish I could have afforded to attend one of his workshops when he was doing them but I learned several valuable things from his books and the videos I have seen of him.
ReplyDelete