A Generosity of Spirit. John Szarkowski on Lee Friedlander's NudesAuthor(s): Christopher LyonSource: MoMA, No. 8 (Summer, 1991), pp. 8-13+23Published by: The Museum of Modern ArtStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4381156 .

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A GENEROSITY OF SPIRIT JOHN SZARKOWSKI ON LEE FRIEDLANDER'S NUDES

BY CHRISTOPHER LYON

~~~~~~ ~~~~~iM iX.

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-S ince 1977, the American photographer Lee Friedlander has made photographs of nudes that belong to a history which includes the work of Bill Brandt, Harry Callahan, Irving Penn, and Edward Weston. Fifty-two pho- tographs, selected from Friedlander's recent book Nudes, published by Pantheon Books, are presented in the exhibition Lee Friedlander: Nudes (opening July 25), which has been organized by John Szarkowski, Consulting Director, Department of Photography.

These photographs, taken with a hand-held Leica camera, range from closely framed figure studies to intimate portraits that include elements of the models' personal environments. Recently, Friedlander visited the Museum and briefly discussed the circum- stances of the project. It began almost casually, at the suggestion of a friend, when he was teaching at Rice University in Texas, and he has continued it sporadically while engaged in other projects. Friedlander, who was born in 1934, is soft-spoken and unre- markable in appearance except for eyes whose dark pupils, set off by pale irises, seem especially pene- trating. He is reticent about his work, though he responded to a visitor's remark that photographs of nudes may make it particularly difficult for a viewer to see the picture past the subject matter. "That's one of the reasons they're hard to do," he said.

On an afternoon several weeks later, Szarkowski talked about some aspects of Friedlander's pic- tures of nudes, including their relation to the artist's other work and to the tradition they extend. He began by discussing the type of model chosen by Friedlander, in comparison with earlier pho- tographers of the nude. Edward Weston and Harry Callahan, for example, chose as subjects women with whom they shared their lives: Weston photographed Charis Wilson over a period of years and Callahan his wife, Eleanor, over decades. Irving Penn, on the other hand, chose the type of anonymous model often employed in art schools, a grown woman "whose body has tangible weight," as Szarkowski wrote in his book on Penn. The relation of Bill Brandt's models to his personal life is not ordinarily thought of as an aspect of their significance, and the same is true of the young women pho- tographed by Friedlander.

"Within limits that I don't know," Szarkowski said, {I think Friedlander's choice of models was random; that is, they are not persons that he had a profound continuing relationship with, like Callahan with Eleanor, who pro- vided a more or less permanent vessel for his artistic ambitions. I think that Friedlander was open to working with almost any mod- erately young woman who was interested in modelling. Friends, friends of friends, friends of other models. To a considerable degree he was, in this case as in most of his work, pleased at the opportu- nity of being able to work from chance, and that includes not just the model but the model's cir- cumstances and surroundings. He doesn't take her to a great beach

covered with stones as Brandt did; he doesn't take her to a complete- ly neutral, impersonal studio environment, like Penn. Appar- ently, in the majority of these cases, he went to the model's place. It interested him: the char- acter of the place, the context, also was part of this opportunity for him. The idea of chance, of contingency, the pleasure in jug- gling, taking an unfamiliar set of circumstances and resolving it, hm? "-constantly in motion as he talks, Szarkowski now and again fixes the listener with an owlish glance and an interrogative "hm?' "as if to be sure one is fol- lowing him-"has always been part of what Friedlander enjoys doing. He loves risk.

"The most original pictures in this show, which may or may not be the best, are the ones in which the subjects are the most specific as individual human beings. In the show and in the book, the most original are the ones that really become portraits. These are in the latter part of the book; in the earlier part are very beautiful and original pictures, which have more to do with Weston than with any other great student of the nude in photography. The lat- ter part of the book has to do much more with the idea of por- traiture than one ever finds in Weston's nudes except for a cou- ple of pictures he made near the end of the time that he was still effectively working. There's one of Charis at a distance, on a swing in the sunlight. It has in it some of the qualities of portraits he made of his own family near the end of his career, pictures that begin to take on the kind of spe- cific quality one associates with a snapshot: this person on that day in this place. Not the universal

Opposite, above: Lee Friedlander. Untitled (pl. 28 from Lee Friedlander: Nudes). n. d. Gelatin-silver print. 12 3/8 X

18 1/2". Collection of the artist.

Opposite, below: Edward Weston. Nude on Sand. 1936. Gelatin-silver print. 75/16 x 9 15/16". The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Edward Steichen.

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wife for the ages, like Eleanor Callahan, but a very contingent, specific, highly focused person on a day, a moment."

Szarkowski wondered whether the two aspects of Friedlander's work with the nude actually reflected a development in time. He wasn't sure because when he and Friedlander sequenced the

book, the prints weren't dated. The question reminded him of a pas- sage in his essay "Atget and the Art of Photography," in volume one of The Work of Atget, which suggests that the path of Atget's development did not follow a straight line, but "might be chart- ed as a coil of overlapping loops, the return of each loop reclaiming earlier ideas and the forward reach exploring new ones."

"A photographer makes a pic- ture like that," he said, pointing

with his finger at an imaginary subject, "and it's done. What he or she does after that to change it is of pretty marginal importance in comparison with what a painter or a sculptor can do. So the way a photographer evolves is in a kind of moving loop. There was an exercise in Palmer Method handwriting, where you created a

moving loop," he explained, illustrating the swivel-wristed exercise practiced by generations of schoolchildren. "The photographer is always going back and revisit- ing earlier work. Then he goes on a little bit, and back, and on a lit- tle bit, and back. That's how his work progresses. It can't be completely logical and consistent in the way one might find in some other mediums because you can't scratch off this line, or scrape that piece of paint off the canvas and begin again. The way you begin again is to make another pic- ture. And then that one's finished. So the

development of photographers has a peculiar kind of ruminative quality where you're inevitably revisiting and doing variations on things you had done earlier." The chronology of the pictures includ- ed in Friedlander's book indicates that the anonymous figure studies and the more portrait-like nudes have just this sort of looping, back-and-forth relation over time.

Compared to earlier students of the nude, Friedlander might seem to impress his vision on his

models less emphatically, to step back further than the others, but Szarkowski dismisses that notion with amusement. "No, it just looks that way. That's a matter of style." He laughs broadly. "Friedlander, after all, is a child of Walker Evans, and in fact was his friend. That is the kind of photo- graphic intelligence out of which Friedlander comes. You could say about Evans that he is stepping back to take what might appear to be a rather self-effacing position. But it's illusory. That's what he wants you to think. That's his system of persuasion.

"We use the word 'documen- tary,' but what do we mean? There have been documents since caves. It's all documents. Documentary means that you create the thing- the photograph, the movie, the novel-in such a way that the style of it makes people think that you're not taking a position, that you're just a chance bystander. Obviously Friedlander is not the chance bystander in all of the houses of these women with no clothes on. So even though these nudes seem to be done with a straight face, at arm's length and with a technical vocabulary which is very clean and unromantic, still the lighting and the drawing and the framing are in fact unfamiliar. There is original artistic play going on here."

Can Friedlander's sensibility be defined in opposition to the romantic? Does that polarity mean something in terms of con- temporary photography? "Oh, I think it probably does, and I think it would be correct to say that in the traditional sense of the word, Friedlander is a classic mentality, rather than a romantic. Partly that's historical, partly it's a mat- ter of a reaction that was common

Harry Callahan. Aix-en-Provence. 1958. Gelatin-silver print. 73/4 X 61/8". The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Stephen R. Currier Memorial Fund.

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to the generation of Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus. Different as their styles and atti- tudes were, they certainly did share a sense of disapprobation, a sense of impatience with the fla- grant romanticism of photogra- phers like Gene Smith or, in another vein, Ernst Haas. There is a line in Eliot, I think it's Four

Quartets, about 'the general mess of imprecision of feeling.'* The idea of imprecision of feeling is a sin laid upon the doorstep of romanticism, hm? Friedlander would not ever want to be accused of imprecise feeling.

"Do you know his book Factory Valleys? There's a pic-

ture, the last one in the main body of the book, of a woman in a factory, grey-haired, wearing a nondescript dress, at some kind of a punch press, I guess. Friedlander really likes that one. It tickles him. He said, She looks to me as though she's playing Bach on the harpsichord. The remark tells you something about his values. This

dumpy lady in that funny, sagging town, in that outmoded factory, can look like she's playing Bach on the harpsichord. That also tells you something about how he would want his work to succeed: it doesn't get there by starting off with an idea that we're already programmed to think is serious, important, or valuable. He starts with some little chord structure, a simple melody that you've heard a million times, and then goes to work."

Each of these photographers seems to find a distinctive avenue toward the abstraction of their subject-using abstraction in the sense of heightening, simplifying, or in some other way removing the subject from the complexity and heterogeneity of the actual world. "Abstraction is a word that's extremely difficult to use

with precision and fairness," Szarkowski cautioned. "It means several things; it means generaliz- ing, and it means clarifying. To the degree that it means general- izing, it is the source of an awful lot of bad photography. What we mean when we say hackneyed, or predictable, or conventional, gen- erally has to do with work in which the idea of a solution pre- cedes the recognition of a prob- lem. A weak photographer starts with a little assortment of all-pur-

Bill Brandt. Number 78 from Perspective of Nudes. 1959. Irving Penn. Nude 130. 1949-50. Gelatin-silver print. 15 1/2 x 143/4". 139/16 X 11 9/16". The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the photographer. of the photographer.

*And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion....

(Eliot, "East Coker," from Four Quartets)

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- V

Lee Friedlander. Untitled (pi. 81 from Lee Friedlander: Nudes). n.d. Gelatin-silver print. 181/2 x 123/8". Collection of the artist.

Edward Weston. Nude. 1936. Gelatin-silver print. 91/2 x 79/16'.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of T. J. Maloney.

pose solutions, patterns, proto- types, models in the physicist's sense. This comes close to one idea of abstraction: to be able to deal with all problems 'in the abstract' without dealing with the specifics of any of them.

"In photography, of course, the first problem everybody who wants to be a photographer has to face is how one goes about reduc- ing specificity to a manageable level. Assuming you get the expo- sure somewhere near right, and now the camera will do that for you, photography is going to give you an awful lot for nothing, a lot of information, more than you expected, or wanted, and probably more than you're competent to deal with. So the problem is, how do you simplify it to produce

some sense of order. There are a lot of ways of doing this. Robert Capa said, If your pictures aren't any good, you're not close enough. In other words, you're including too much; a good photo- graph says one thing with graphic simplicity and gets out fast. Well, that's not good enough for Fried- lander, and in fact it's not good enough for anyone anymore."

In Szarkowski's book about Garry Winogrand, he illustrates the progressive complexity of Winogrand's motifs through a comparison between a 1953 pic- ture of a football game, in which two players are seen, and a picture from 1974 in which all twenty- two players are in motion (along with three officials). "Friedlander was never one to just go for com-

plexity, no holds barred. He has always had much more of a disci- plined, thoughtful, even calculat- ing kind of artistic mind than Winogrand. You'd never see a con- tact sheet of Friedlander's that didn't have several well-made pho- tographs on it; whether they would be interesting enough for him is another matter, but he isn't just shooting arrows into the air on the basis of feeling and intu- ition and hope. Of course, that's not what Winogrand did either, but he took, in the end, greater and greater risks, which I think finally became unrealistic risks."

To illustrate this development within the history of the nude, he opens Edward Weston's book Fifty Photographs (1947), turning to the nude study reproduced on page 12.

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Lee Friedlander. Untitled (pl.44 from Lee Friedlander: Nudes). n.d. Gelatin-silver print. 8 1/16 X 12". Collection of the artist.

"This is a wonderful book; I learned a lot from it. But this pic- ture was shocking to me because of this." He points to the model's right arm, which is made to appear unnaturally thin by a shadow that falls along its length. "Remember Alice the Goon?" he asks, refer- ring to the character in the car- toon series Popeye. "She had immense forearms and skinny lit- tle upper arms. This picture was really painful to me. And then a friend of mine, an architect, said, You're crazy, that makes the fig- ure into a more perfect egg. And gradually I came to recognize that it is a terrific picture. Now, Weston's acceptance of that dis- tortion for the sake of a more unfamiliar kind of order is brave

and admirable. But that decision or response is very much less com- plex than the decisions being made by Friedlander, where things are happening in a much wider frame and changing more rapidly."

How does Szarkowski think our reaction to these pictures might compare with our respons- es to the pictures of young women that are so ubiquitous in popular entertainment, advertis- ing, and pomography? "I wrote a piece a while ago on Friedlander's self-portraits. He's done a lot of them and even published a book of them. One is immediately struck by the fact that he doesn't seem to give a damn about whether he looks handsome, alert, intelligent, well-dressed,

and so on. He's willing to look at himself in a great range of aspects, not in what would conventionally be called a flattering light. Think how rare it is in self-portraits for the artist to be unconcemed with making-by some standard or other-a good impression, and instead being interested in the open-endedness of his own self. I think what that has to do with is a generosity of spirit. A spirit that doesn't require dissembling, or retouching, or special pleading, a generosity of spirit that reflects an interest in what the world is real- ly like and the enormous variety of the ways that it looks, and the variety of its meanings or what it can seem to mean. That generosi- ty is what these pictures are

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LEE FRIEDLANDER, continued from page 13

about, too. It's why, it seems to me, they can be at the same time carnal and friendly."

John Szarkowski, director of the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art since 1962, retired from that position on July 1. He will remain as con- sulting director of the department through the summer and contin- ue as a consultant to the Museum thereafter. During his tenure, the department has presented more than one hundred exhibitions at the Museum, and he has also been responsible for the contin- ued development of the Museum's collection of more than twenty thousand photo- graphic prints dating from about 1840 to the present. His most recent major exhibition, seen at the Museum in the winter of 1990, was Photography Until Now, which offered a fundamen- tal reinterpretation of the tradi- tion of the medium. Among the many other major exhibitions he has organized are Garry Winogrand (1988), Irving Penn (1984), the four-part The Work of Atget (1981-85), Mirrors and Win- dows: American Photography since 1960 (1978), Harry Callahan (1976), Walker Evans (1971), and The Photographer's Eye (1964).

Mr. Szarkowski was born in Ashland, Wisconsin, in 1925. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin, which granted him an honorary doctorate this year. He is the recipient of the City of New York Mayor's Award of Honor for Arts and Culture (1979) and the Friends of Photography Award for Distinguished Career in Photography (1988). Mr.

Szarkowski is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, and served as Andrew D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University (1983-89). Before joining the Museum staff, he received two Guggenheim fel-

lowships for his own photogra- phy, which he used to produce the book The Idea of Louis Sullivan (1956) and to photograph the Quetico wilderness area of western Ontario (1961). He will now resume his career as a pho- tographer.

- -~ --

I'd ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~w

Top: Lee Friedlander. Untitled (pl. 2 from Lee Friedlander: Nudes) n.d. Gelatin-silver print. 81/16 X 12". Collection of the artist.

Above: Lee Friedlander. Untitled (pl. 51 from Lee Friedlander: Nudes) n.d. Gelatin-silver print. 123/8 x 181/2". Collection of the artist.

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