This is one of my favorite photos of Lee Friedlander. And, I’m sure, that of many more people; it is both simple and complex. There is nothing special about this photograph and, nevertheless, it is so complete, a miracle of design. This proliferation of elements crystallizes into a complicated puzzle that fits together perfectly. If we remove the dog, the traffic lights or the fire hydrant…, we will only disturb the balance of the photo.
Friedlander does not need to resort to the so-called “decisive moment”, as Cartier Bresson would, or the inherent fleeting nature of a snapshot, which produced such beautiful results for Helen Levitt or her friend Garry Winogrand. If they give us the impression that everything happens in a flash or that, in the blink of an eye, what we see immediately transforms into something else and does not repeat itself in its current form, when Friedlander takes the picture Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1972, we imagine that a second later everything will be the same, but everything will change if one of the elements of the painting disappears. The magic is not in the “decisive moment”, but rather in the “precise framing”, the way the world that stretches out before the camera turns into photography. And the novelty lies not only in the way of describing the world, but also in the subjects chosen to do so. They are no longer subject to the traditional concepts of what is beautiful and harmonious, but rather offer a formal sense of the disorder of the landscape, sometimes desolate, full of aggressive elements such as power lines, traffic signs or road signs. ‘display.
The image is created in a confluence of small, almost instantaneous decisions by which the photographer delimits the final result. The framing emphasizes the elements chosen by him among the many potential framing options and banishes others to the margins; they thus come to life, creating a new relationship between them, each element having as much meaning as another, without hierarchy. Everything looks familiar – it’s an ordinary environment – but the photography is not; this apparent arbitrariness is organized in the frame, like a magical recording of a commonplace. Rather than emphasizing each element, we can also see the image as an abstract composition, in which there is no point in looking for meaning and we should just enjoy it. The result is a Friedlander, a world where the real elements coexist in the same space with reflections and shadows, and where there is obviously a tremendous ability to find that diffuse factor which, in an unexpected and sudden way, will prove essential to understanding the world.
Carlos Gollonet. Conservative
Lee Friedlander
From 01/10/2020 to 10/01/2021
MAPFRE Foundation
Recoletos showroom. Madrid
https://www.fundacionmapfre.org/fundacion