Lee Friedlander exhibition in London

LEE FRIEDLANDER

at the Timothy Taylor Gallery, Carlos Place, London

September 2011

outside the gallery in Carlos Place

There was no charge to see the Lee Friedlander exhibition; after all, the prints were on sale at prices ranging from about 600 to almost 1,000 USD. The gallery itself is situated just south of Grosvenor Square which meant a walk through the West End in late afternoon sunshine. There are not so many people and cars here as in Oxford Street to the north and Piccadily to the south.

The exhibition space was composed of white walls on which were hung a couple of exhibitions by Lee Friedlander at about eye level; these ran around the room. There were very few people which allowed one a good view of the prints which were excellently crafted and, in some cases, such as the auto-portrait Lee Friedlander presents at the very end of the exhibition, one wonders how he managed to get such a wide range of tones in the image and capture such a wide dynamic range since there is darkness of the car’s interior as well as sunlight falling on skin. Presumably, he has good knowledge of the Zone system.

Inside the Timothy Taylor Gallery

Lee Friedlander appears to belong to the school of black and white photography in which form plays an important part. Woven around these forms, often partially framed by the car itself, are wonderfully and highly complex details. Although not a post-modernist, Lee Friedlander seems to anticipate the era that was to follow.

The first series of photographs are about cars from 1964. Lee Friedlander was given a brief by Harpers Bazaar magazine to photograph the new cars just coming on the market. He did this but instead of putting the cars at the centre of his images, he says “I just put the cars out in the world, instead of on a pedestal.” Nowadays, such an approach might be considered almost de rigeur but at that time cars were supreme status symbols, a Very Big Deal, and his approach was deemed “subversive” and too avant-garde. Contextualising the subject albeit artistically was not an acceptable approach.

The second series of Lee Friedlander’s photographs are taken from a car, hence “America by Car”; we move from photographs of car exteriors to photographs made from car interiors of the outside world which perhaps indicates a shift in Lee Friedlander’s way of looking at the world. Here he uses a super-wide camera but crops the images to a square. He makes use of “side and rear view mirrors, windscreens and side mirrors as framing devices”. The compositions are visually intriguing as well as being technically superbly crafted; they give an impression of America that is varied although there are few people and often little sign of life. It is a steely eyed and yet somewhat sterilized view of the United States.

None of the photographs in either section carry captions although these can be found elsewhere; one is left to enjoy the visual treat Lee Friedlander presents without the need for reference.

Pond in Carlos Place