Lee Friedlander Framed by Joel Coen
Photographs by Lee Friedlander, edited by Joel Cohen
Published by Fraenkel Gallery, 72 pages, published in 2023
Purchase via the Fraenkel Gallery page (preferred) or via Amazon
I think it was in the book Friedlander First Fifty where I read that Lee Friedlander puts his prints in various boxes, categorized by various keywords—chain link fence, pick-up trucks, self-portraits—and when there are enough pictures in the box then that becomes a book. True? It certainly could be true—there is a new Friedlander book every year, it seems, and the title of Friedlander First Fifty—referring to Friedlander’s first fifty books—doesn’t come close to including the whole catalog.
Last year the Friedlander book was “by” Joel Cohen, one half of the famed filmmaking duo, who selected the images from the great library of Friedlander images and sequenced them, all along the theme of “Framed”—the straightforwardly descriptive title of the book.
“Framed” can mean many things, the framing (and composition of the elements) within the picture area as well as elements within the picture area themselves. There are all manner of “frames” within the Friedlander images reproduced here from actual picture frames to telephone poles dividing the image area into separate panels to beams of light forming a rectangular patch upon a wall.
It’s one of those boxes of Friedlander images but chosen for the box by someone other than Friendlander.
If you are already familiar with Friedlander’s work you don’t need this introduction (or this review, in fact) and you already know that Freidlander insists on not commenting on his work, not adding to what is already in the images because, quite logically, you have the images in front of you and what else more can be usefully said? (Fair enough, he had John Szarkowski, the famed head of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, to say it all for him.)
With all of that preamble, let’s get to the book, and rather than add to the commentary, sharing my theories and deep thoughts, I’ll just write down a description of what I see, to try to hint at some of the generosity of the medium that is a key characteristic of Friedlander’s work, as well as that generosity being something essential to photography itself.
The second picture in the book is of some suburban street corner and what hits me at first are the two telephone poles, parallel to each other, that divide the frame in half, and sandwiched tightly behind those two poles is one of those tall, skinny trees which for many years was, weirdly, a go-to landscaping tree. A split-second later we see the little dog, alert, his ears up and quizzical, looking off a bit to the photographer’s left. Then we notice that the curving curb at the front bottom of the image turns and, as it recedes into the distance, runs parallel to the right-hand edge of the frame, and, of course, we see the other telephone poles, and then we notice that everything is fresh-built and why did the purposely place two telephone poles, the ones that bisect the frame of the picture, so close together in the first place? Then we notice the plantings, small trees and bushes in little craters periodically spaced within the no-grass-in-sight dirt yards of this neighborhood, and then wonder why that tall tree, the one sandwiched by the telephone poles, is there in that it must be forty feet tall and surely isn’t a new planting but yet it’s an ornamental tree and surely not something that was already there when they built this development. There’s a car parked in the drive of the house that forms the center of the frame and, if you look closely another car parked in the drive a few houses down that receding road and that may or may not be a white tanker truck parked behind that car in the next lot down—and is that a sign sticking up in front of that tanker truck and is that then a gas station? But, aside from the dog and the artificially placed plant life, there is no sign of life whatsoever, not even moving cars, and my eye keeps coming back to the dog.
On page 15 there is a vertical picture of a street protest in some city’s downtown, camera titled slightly upward, the faces of two women close to the camera, faces dominating the frame, and above them all sorts of American flags jutting up, all of the flags and all of the poles that the flags are hung from seeming to be identical. Both of the women wear glasses, the one closest to the camera looking straight at the viewer from behind her horned-rimmed glasses—the color of the frames looks to be some lighter color, not black—and the woman behind her to our left wears dark sunglasses, her eyes invisible, her glasses reminding me of the music group Devo more than anything else although the protest takes place many years before Devo. You wonder if these sunglasses were fashionable back then or did they looked as odd then as they do now? Her hair looks like a wig and she has a heavy metal chain around her neck, over her white sweater. There is a man, back in the crowd, that you now see is all women, and he is staring, his eyes masked by deep shadows, in our direction, possibly directly at us. There are people in the crowd wearing military helmets (Brodie Helmets, if you have Wikipedia handy), we count six, seemingly a high ratio of soldiers to protesters visible in the frame. There are signs carried by the protesters, a little bit way in the back on the right-hand side of the frame and one reads “BURN the” and then something below that in a lighter color that I can’t distinguish and another sign in front of it proclaims “HELL YES WE LOVE the U.S.!” with the word “love” encircled by a heart, and then, only partly visible at the right edge another sign says “DIE” and some other writing I can’t make out. The flag pole carried by the lady with the horn-rimmed glasses cuts the frame of the picture in two, its pole so very close to us that it is blurred despite her face being in focus, and the flag attached to that pole flutters toward us as well, taking up about a fourth of the entire image. Then we look again at the other flags and notice that the tall building on the left echoes the stripped pattern on the flags with uncanny fidelity. And then there is the person in the bottom left of the frame holding the cigarette with the long ash and wearing an ugly shirt or blouse and I didn’t mention her before (in my mind it is a “her”) because for some reason she bothers me.
Now we are on pages 23 and 24, an image spread, regretfully, through the gutter of the book’s binding that is hard to see as it was intended to be seen by Friedlander. On the left-hand side we see a poster for…something—maybe a product, a sex show, or who knows. A voluptuous woman wearing a black corset with black sleeves from her shoulders to her wrists, arms raised and hip jutted, high heels and a chain necklace diving deep between her breasts, the word “Ecstasy” (with the quotation marks included) printed large in a script font and underlined, all on a white background and then you see the edge of another poster to the left, barely in the frame, of what must be a listing of shows and showtimes. The next thing you notice, nearly simultaneously, is the right-hand side of the image’s frame, where a waitress—she might look like a nurse at first but look more carefully and she is wearing an apron, is bent over behind condensation-covered glass, some sort of window, her back up against the “ceiling” of the widow, as if she is holding it up in some way, and she’s all a little blurry from the condensation and she looks surprised a bit, caught in the act of doing something, and below her are the words, painted in large block letters, “CHILI-Spaghetti” and below it “CONEY ISLAND,” both texts cut off by the right edge of the frame. And then you notice that the waitress is standing, it appears, on the table, on the table where customers usually sit—you can see the salt and pepper shakers there in the blurry window and then you notice all of the signs—one appears to be in the style of a lighted movie marquee—reflected in the glass so it must be behind the photographer though at first you took it for something behind the waitress and there are shadowy reflections of a hanging longcoat and paintings in the window but those look now not be reflections but must actually be in the room with the waitress. You notice the frame around the waitress’s window, which looks an awful lot at first glance like the frame of a painting in a museum and you see the similar metal frame around the Ecstasy poster and the showtimes poster next to it, and you see how the architecture of the buildings is framing these frames (and, if you have imagination, you can sense how the building’s structure, hidden in the book’s gutter, would contribute to this multitude of framings), and then you notice—how could we have missed it before?–that the waitresses window is “framed” on the top and left (we can’t see the right edge) with glowing fluorescent tubes and then we see the white piece of paper on the dark sidewalk outside of the building, at the bottom of the image frame, and recognize it as a spent matchbook, and wonder if that matters at all.
This is exhausting, writing all of this down.
On page 32 is an image I can’t figure out. The image is of a brick building, some sort of industrial structure from the turn of the century perhaps, another metal streetlamp pole sticking up through the frame and a sawn-off telephone pole next to that, with caution tape wrapped around it, and in the building is a recessed doorway, and the building is on a hill, you can see the extraordinarily wide concrete sidewalk slanting down to the righthand above that doorway is a door-like widow with a window sill that inexplicably looks like a set of descending stairs. Cast down upon the sidewalk is some large shelving unit or refrigerator with a side or door torn off or missing and there is a fist-sized stone laying on the sidewalk in front of the shelving unit and there are weeds sticking up in the immediate foreground and along the gaps in the sidewalk. But what dominates the picture, and is really the very first thing you see, is another picture, framed with wood panels that look like temporary construction panels of some sort. At first glance, I took the framed picture to be a photograph or lifelike painting, brightly illuminated in this otherwise dark scene, on some poster showing what the future would bring once this old factory was torn down. A closer inspection of this poster disabuses me of this notion since the hillside with houses that it depicts also includes, dominant in the foreground, a demolished structure, all rubble and dirt. Certainly not an advertisement by the development company. Then I realized that this framed image must be a window into something behind the facade of the brick building, that perhaps the brick structure was the last wall standing of this old building, and that the whole area was being redeveloped and that was what we are seeing in the window, perhaps those houses there are the new units, and similar houses would soon cover the area. But that didn’t seem quite right either. There is a black mark, a sort of scratch-like line, at the top of the frame, which doesn’t look quite right for a window, and there are broken glass shapes along the bottom of this window that at hint at, well, something, I’m not sure what to make of them. And then it occurs to me that this “window” is a mirror and that what I’m seeing is the scene behind the photographer. I note that at the far left of the Friendlander image you can just see past the brick facade and there is a chimney and the sunlight upon the chimney seems to be coming from the direction of the distant right of the image, in front of the photographer, to the right, though the sun is blocked by the building and thus the scene is mostly in shadow. Looking at the shadows in the mirror, the light seems to be coming from behind the photographer, to his right, which is to say, reversed, so that is all makes sense. I double-check the position of the light pole and the abandoned box-shape on the sidewalk and it seems plausible that they would not appear in the mirror. And then I’m satisfied that I’ve figured out what I am looking at but I’m worried about why the scene is mostly shadow though the front of the building should be in the sunlight, if my conclusion is correct, and I see the dark foreground shadow in the mirror and suspect another building behind the photographer is darkening the scene but I’m no longer sure and this lighting algebra exercise had left me in doubt.
That’s four pictures and an awful lot of text just trying to describe what is in the pictures, which speaks to two things: the ability of a photograph to do something special beyond language and to Friedlander’s ability to notice and record these scenes (and, of course, in the particular case of this book, to Joel Coen’s ability to pick out these photographs).
I have long felt that Friedlander’s work lives somewhere near the very heart of photography. Anyone can take a picture and many people can take good photographs, but it is also true that you see an awful lot of photographs, both from young people just coming out of art school as well as those from more experienced practitioners, whose photographs fail to show that “photographicness” despite being photographs. It is less a matter of equipment and technique than, quite simply, a matter of seeing.
How many Friedlander books are on my bookshelves? They all offer their charms, from Factory Valleys, a book near and dear to my heart having grown up near the sponsoring museum in Akron, Ohio, and seeing this work as my first exposure to Friedlander’s work, to the hilariously funny The New Cars 1964 (did Friendlander really think the corporate guys would go for these images?—and, by the way, several of the images in Framed could very well be from that project), to the over-sized America by Car, another book put out (like this one) by Friedlander’s great champion, the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. I have a shelf of Friedlander’s books, maybe two shelves, but there always seems to be room for one more.
