A Portrait of the Portrait-Artist,
Photographer Lee Friedlander's Preservation of E.J. Bellocq's Storyville Photos
by Laura Kuhn
Peeling off the skin of photography and exposing the raw art of aesthetically pleasing composition, there lays a certain American photographer whose act of composing a photograph sends a poison-dipped arrow through the heart of this medium. Lee Friedlander's wealth of ideas and visually stimulating content in his photographs inspires many budding shutterbugs and captures the title of being considered one of the most important photographers of the current era.
In 1934, Lee Friedlander was born in Aberdeen, Washington. After a decade of life, he was introduced to photography and moved on to study at the Art Center in Los Angeles, California. Friedlander became a commercial photographer and teacher at several universities including UCLA, the University of Minnesota, and Rice University. His lifetime of photographs won him three Guggenheim Fellowships, five grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was recently given the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Award (Evans). Along with this list of honors, Friedlander's work has appeared in a number of periodicals including Esquire, Art in America, McCall's, Seventeen, and Sports Illustrated (Harden). As author of seventeen books in the last thirty-two years, many of the photographs from Lee Friedlander's thick and diverse body of work are featured in the world's major museum collections.
While city streets, landscapes, nudes, portraits, and the industrial environment are major elements featured throughout his series of photographs, Friedlander's most important subject is himself. He accents the far side of the camera by creating an archetype for self-imaging, using his mirrored reflection or the presence of his shadow as a strategy to include himself in the images (Davis).
With complex surfaces, multi-layered vision, and the witty, playful ambiguities of manipulating the awkward "snapshot" quality, Friedlander creates order out of chaos, his photographs flowing with stream-of-consciousness. According to biographer Peter Marshall, "Friedlander makes great use of the 'mistakes' of photography, such as the inclusion of his own shadow, or 'false attachment' in which objects can be joined-- in one a triumphant statuette exults from the top of his shadowed head" (Marshall).
For fifteen years of Lee Friedlander's career, he focused his camera lens on the cultural nostalgia of American musicians, creating jazz portraits for most of the leading giants of the music world such as John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Punch Miller, and Sweet Emma Barrett. These color and black-and-white photos are featured in his 500 page book, American Musicians. Among these include historical moments from Billie Holiday's funeral march, and the striking portrait of Miles Davis as he stares intensely at the camera (Slotnikoff).
But Lee Friedlander's career does not stop at the click of a camera or the focus of a lens. He also helped create the only true-to-life visual record of an extraordinary part of American history. Twenty years after the death of Ernest J. Bellocq, a hideous hydrocephalic who lived as a commercial photographer in New Orleans during the early nineteen hundreds, Friedlander bought eight-nine damaged glass-negatives of Bellocq's work. The images were far from any seen before, capturing the "working girls" of Storyville, the turn-of-the-century Red-light District in New Orleans. These prostitutes allowed Bellocq to photograph their portraits, not in the same manner of today's lewd pornography, but instead with a revealing simplicity that expresses the photographer's respect for these women (Wilfong).
After Lee Friedlander purchased these masterpieces on glass plates, he printed them using indirect sunlight and an extensive amount of exposure time. In 1996 later, Random House published a book of high-quality prints from Friedlander's reproduced images of Bellocq's work, Photographs from Storyville (Wilfong). Thanks to these masterminds, the twenty-first century now has access to the most lurid and forbidden portal of America's sordid past.
In a sense of humor and irony, Lee Friedlander's view of the world is vividly captured inside the frame. His photographs beg the viewer to take a closer look at the typical, nonchalant way of the world and to see the complex simplicity of things taken for granted. He is an artist of sophistication and juxtaposition, using splendid sorcery to make the unnoticed suddenly extraordinary.
-Laura Kuhn
Copyright © 2004
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