The Astonishingly Fecund Lee Friedlander

“Friedlander,” the exhibition of photographs by Lee Friedlander at the Museum of Modern Art, opens June 5, but you can’t see it. Or, you can’t see all of it. Or, at any rate, you can’t really see all of it. Leastwise, I couldn’t at the press preview. There are more than 477 black-and-white pictures on the walls, plus some in color, plus 25 examples of books, special editions, and portfolios. If you sit down to leaf through one of the copies of “Friedlander” provided for your inspection, there are 764 plates plus 96 other illustrations: My eyeballs just aren’t up to it. Only a photographer as fecund as Lee Friedlander could be presented this way.Mr. Friedlander (b. 1934) is protean, productive, and durable. It was at MoMA in 1967 that the “New Documents” exhibition, organized by then director of photography John Szarkowski, first brought him general recognition, along with Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand. The three started from pretty much the same place, responding to pretty much the same models – Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Eugene Atget – but each went in a different direction, and each got to go a different distance. Mr. Friedlander, the only one of the three still alive, and very much still actively engaged in making photographs, actually got to go in several directions over the course of the last half century, and it would not surprise people who have followed his career if at this point he were to head off in yet another direction.Starting in the 1950s as a documentarian/street photographer, Mr. Friedlander let his idiosyncrasies and obsessions take his career where they would. There is, for starters, his humor. Maybe the most conspicuous example of this is the many pictures he has taken in which his own shadow is an important element. One classic instance is “New York City” (1966): We know it was shot in Midtown because one of the Fifth Avenue churches is on the left and a wall of storefronts is across the street on the right. The foreground is taken up by the back of a woman’s head, a pedestrian with very blond hair wearing a fur coat with a fluffy collar. The shadow of a man’s head falls conspicuously on her shoulders. This is somewhat funny and somewhat threatening. It seems to comment on class and sex, but also on urbanity and serendipity, and on all of them at once.Another instance is “Canyon de Chelly, Arizona” (1983), where the shadow of a man holding a camera to his eye and carrying an equipment bag is cast on a desert floor of sand, stones, and scrub. Again, there is something very comic about this: the figure is elongated, a bush seems to be his hair, and it is absurd that we should feel a human presence so forcibly in a fleeting shadow. Mr. Friedlander has used his shadow to establish himself in his pictures throughout his career, but he has also included himself by shooting his reflection (frequently in plate-glass storefronts) or by shooting himself with the aid of a timer or cable release. Conversely, he has also used shadows of objects other than himself as critical elements in his images. There is vertiginous difference, but there is also a continuity of several strands.Peter Galassi, the current chief curator of the museum’s Department of Photography, organized “Friedlander” by breaking the artist’s enormous corpus of work into manageable segments based on various projects and the books that resulted from them. There is a wall with a generous selection from “The American Monument,” published in 1976: It shows Mr. Friedlander moving away from his sources. Evans and Frank included pictures of monuments in “American Photographs” and “The Americans,” respectively, but they tended to be incidental to a streetscape or else are shown ironically. Mr. Friedlander was interested in monuments themselves, what they look like close up, how they appear in their varied settings, and what they mean to the communities that erect them.“To Those Who Made the Supreme Sacrifice, Bellows Falls, Vermont” (1971) presents, in the center of the picture, the base of a monument with a carved female figure standing draped in a classical gown, holding a sword and shield, and crowned with laurel. This is the green in a small New England town: Handsome old wood-frame houses are in the background, modernity is represented by a few automobiles and the telephone wires overhead, and there is only one person, a woman crossing the street. It is a sunny summer day. There seems to be a relationship between the figure in marble and the Yankee woman keeping carefully between the stripes of the crosswalk. “The American Monument” is a wonderfully nuanced examination of public tributes too casually taken for granted.“Nudes” is not at all like “The American Monument.” These women, not all so young or so beautiful, are scrunched up and laid out in someone’s living room. Their body parts are distorted without the benefit of Andre Kertesz’s funhouse mirror, and without the heroic classicism of Bill Brandt’s nudes. The one thing they indefatigably are is naked women, their genitalia displayed as architectural fixtures on complex forms. What these photographs most clearly have in common with Lee Friedlander’s other projects is an obsessive need to know a subject with his camera, to work through a theme in multiple variations.If there is too much in this exhibition to be absorbed in one viewing, there is too much to be covered in a single re view. Just to touch on a few points: Mr. Friedlander takes wonderful portraits, and a special treat is his pictures of fathers (himself included) with their children. Many of the men he photographs are artists, difficult personalities, but Mr. Friedlander has affection for families and finds the ways the fathers attach themselves to their sons and daughters. There are many pictures of flowers, both growing outdoors and in vases, and he presents them as they have traditionally been represented in art as beautiful, simply beautiful. This fearless embrace of the beauty in nature is his boldest break with his 1950s contemporaries. There are more pictures of chain-link fences, those most American protectors of property except perhaps for barbed wire, than you would expect to find in an art museum. And deserts. And factories. Signs. And on and on and on.Lee Friedlander reminds me of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Odysseus, bound with his Hasselblad for one more adventure, “strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”From June 5 until August 29 (11 W. 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-708-9400).

The Astonishingly Fecund Lee Friedlander

More from the New York Sun

The Trump Administration Takes on Harvard on Antisemitism

A Reconciliation Bill Is the Only Way To Keep Our Military Great and Our Democracy Indestructible

Somaliland, Pro-Western Partially Recognized State on Horn of Africa, Dives Into American Politics With Wild X Account

Birthright Citizenship Before the Nine

The Opportunity in Somaliland

CBS News Announces End to Radio Service After Run of Almost 100 Years

DOJ Sues Harvard Alleging Civil Rights Violations Against Jewish and Israeli Students

The New Museum, Once a Scrappy Cultural Renegade, Matures Into an Artistic Elder Statesman