Notes from 3 exhibitions. Friedlander, Day and The Hungarians

Three shows when I only anticipated two – thanks to Miriam, who had spotted a Corinne Day show close by the Friedlander, that we fitted in between the latter and the Hungarians at the RA.

Lee Friedlander

The Timothy Taylor had two bodies of work: America By Car and The New Cars 1964. Typically (for me) I started to view the prints from the end of the show and worked backwards – this has the drawback of not getting the notes surrounding the images at the appropriate time, but it is something I’ve also found to be a benefit in that I’m not preconditioned to respond in any way. The America By Car series has been well documented so I wasn’t surprised by the structure of the prints and my initial reaction was that Friedlander, it would appear, has come from a background in “fine art photography”. 

 Lake Louise

The images are generally well processed, quite sharp - as you’d expect from the equipment he used - and fine grain monochrome. I found it interesting that in a number of the shots there were snatches of he great American landscape – the Tetons, Montana, which suggested a connection between what this series was about and the tradition of Adams, Weston etc., something that I might look into later. However I also thought that the technical quality could have been improved with some spotting and cleaner processing.

The “America” series relied on a very limited set of viewpoints and (most of them) had a dynamic composition that moved the eye across the image in a natural way. The compositions being:

            Across from the drivers position to incorporate the wing mirror, side window, the top of the driver door (at the base of the window).

            Through the passenger window, with a similar construct as above.

            Through the windscreen, slightly to the right of the steering wheel.

            Straight out of either the drivers window, or the same again through the passengers window.

The mirror – in some shape or form - appeared in all but about six prints. The mirror is a very creative device and can be used to deliver all sorts of information, messages, allegories and I’m not sure whether the mirror is there because of the angle of view, or whether it was deliberately placed in the frame. For some of the shots the case is clearly made for its deliberate inclusion with either Freidlander looking at us looking at him and, when another person is captured clearly moving into the frame via their own reflection. Other mirror inclusions had a blank screen and at the moment I am undecided on this point.

Quite a few of the images had a deliberate inclusion of text, from various signs: road signs, hotel signs, entertainment signs, religious signs which all invite us, as the readers, to conclude and propose a context for the images.

The America series focused on America, the land and the people – more specifically on the “blue collar” life – there were no privileged situational shots. It was trucks, trailers, parking lots, shopping areas, seedy bars and almost devoid of people – there were a few, maybe five or so, that featured people.

Movement, the lack of it, was another key element in this series. The “Car”, being the tripod to ensure both that the shot is not suffering any camera movement is used to ensure the view is clear. The camera is static, the subject is static, the monumental exteriors whether they are mountains, parked trucks, building’s and even the very few people seen in the shots are static. It is therefore then a record of a time and space as seen through a car window with the car not performing it’s function as the emblematic consumer product that typified the American dream of freedom more than any other product in American history. And it is Friedlander himself who provides the only movement in the 192 prints in the “America By Car” series. It is he alone, in the parting shot entitled “Lee”- a self-portrait of Friedlander, looking into the “Car”, at us, the viewer, that by pressing the shutter release cable with his finger, reveals the only movement. And he must surely have known that would have done so, he would surely have seen that in the negative and the print that he used as his parting shot for the series.

My overall impression from the “Americans” was that it may have started as an accident – a shutter released whilst getting out of a car, which produced serendipitously both an interesting composition and a reflective image, both from the detail within the frame and with the inclusion of the mirror – but it sparked the generation of a body of work that reflects personally on the USA. The use of a car perhaps emphasizes the continual transience of that society at that time, is still relevant today. There were 192 prints in this set which all seemed to be saying the same thing; taking the viewer to similar uncompleted resolutions, similar ambiguities, similar unfinished puzzle and relying on the viewer to conclude.

The New Cars.

Again I started the viewing of the set from the end of the show and worked backwards. My clear impression as I did so was that this series, whilst it featured cars, had nothing in common with the other set. It recorded the car in its environment, bringing it to the fore and setting it in the background, but always the automobile and it’s position within the society was the key to the shot. No mirror shots this time!

It therefore came as no surprise that this set was a commission to produce accompanying pictorial content for a magazine featuring new cars for the current year 1964! Well, despite, the editor spiking the shots which weren’t seen for many years, Friedlander succeeded – well at least as far as I was concerned. The images often sublimated the car within the environment using various devices such as a reflection in a shop window (where he sometimes included himself) or behind a stack of used car tyres. But it was the “Car” that provided all the context and reference, whereas in the previous series it is often left to the viewer to provide the context and reference – based on signage, what was in the mirrors or what was outside the automobile. This advertising set succeeded to portray the car front and foremost, even when sublimated and the editor seems to have missed an opportunity. The series seemed to suggest that the “Car” was an integral part of the community; it’s physical presence and it’s spirit is omnipresent in the life and culture of American life and when there wasn’t one “car” in shot there were multiple cars.

There was less to bring to this series than the “American By Car” series and its substance was less for it.


http://www.galeriezander.com/de/artist/lee_friedlander/works

Jan's blog entry for this which helped me locate some images;

janfairburnoca.blogspot.com/2011/09/lee-friedlander-timot...

I certainly felt challenged by these prints, I wanted to question almost all of the "America by Car" set and to that extent it was a worthwhile experience.

Corinne Day

The Face at the Gimpel Fils Gallery.

The exhibition had twenty prints taken from Day's work with "The Face" magazine. The images are of Kate Moss in the main and I think reveal nothing about Day - they were in the main fashion shoots and therefore say more about the model or the clothes/lifestyle; which in turn says something about Day in as much as she hasn't imposed herself on the image. With only twenty shots it is difficult to draw any conclusions. So I didn't.

The Hungarians

The exhibition at the RA covered Hungarian photography from most of the last century – with a copy of Kertesc’s “The Boy Sleeping” his oldest know surviving print. My initial impression is that whilst these photographs come from a very wide time period (in photographic terms) it has been curated to depict a common desire for pictorial images. Whilst there are significant number of surrealist images there isn’t a hint of post-modernism. These are photographs from the pictorial school, it’s a take-away exhibition, very little investment is required from the viewer as the photographer has provided the context the references (maybe in some cases too many, I’ll come to that later) and delivered with very high quality – I took away the print book and I have to say that I’m slightly disappointed with that as the print quality is about a grade, to a grade and half short of the real thing – I suppose cost is the issue.

As I consider the range of images on show I’m thinking that photographers on the course could see virtually all the aspects of “The Art of Photography” in one place, barring the colour work! The essential compositional constructs covered in the course are all in evidence, lines, points, diagonals, triangles and narrative. People and Place is similarly covered with bold coverage of urban, rural, war, nude and fashion all covered – though the curator of this exhibition could have had a wider nude content, but that is a mild criticism. The counter to all this is that a good deal of the images would have subverted the course’s early instruction with compositions that defy the ordered structure of the course, but that is a conversation to be had at a different time.

The work by Brassai is very impressive, the scale of his ambition matched by the ambitious scale of his photographs, the “Festivities in Bayonne” and “Meadows in the Isere Valley. The decision what to include and to discard must be very difficult and whilst “Bijou of Montparnasse” below left and the “Prostitute Playing Russian Billiards” were included but there is a significant body of work that seems to have been omitted such as the nudes and the homosexuals – below.

Bijou of Montmartre, 1932 (gelatin silver print)

Brassai (1899-1984) Bridgeman

Kertesc, perhaps the “father” of the Hungarian school of photography is perhaps my favourite of these photographers on show, he prided himself on recording his subjects – not leaving his “signature” on the image, except by its absence. He was never formally taught photography and after a hesitant start he set a trail that most others have followed. It was Cartier-Bresson who said “whatever we have done, Kertesc did first”.

 The opening print – Kertesc’s oldest original print “The Boy Sleeping”, composed on the diagonal, with triangles, implied triangles liberally sprinkled on the image and this is before he decides to make a career out of photography. “The Lovers”, which seems a very intimate shot for an amateur was again shot before he uprooted to Paris in 1925 ten years after he took this, when he was a serving soldier. Simply composed on the diagonal in much the same way as the photograph above left.

It was after he got to Paris and before he went to America (to escape persecution from the Nazi threat) that he performed his most daring and adventurous photography that others followed in his wake. Keretesc’s work with surrealism and other modern art movements in Paris paved the way for Brassai et al.

I found the print “Elizabeth and I” the most poignant and he has several versions of it the full length version:

 and, for me, the most telling:

Moholy-Nagel and Munkacsi are both well represented as well as a significant number of other photographers. Whilst several of Robert Capa’s images are now very famous I am troubled by the staged manner of some of his photographs, especially “Drinking Tea at the Refuge” London 1941, but his “Woman Who Had a Child with a German Soldier, Being Marched through the Street” Chartres 1944 is a frightful image.

As I have said earlier, this is a take-away exhibition. It seems unlikely that the viewer would not come away with something from this show and probably a lot, the range of images, the different print techniques, many differing sectors of the photographic art-form are all represented.

http://jeux.courrierinternational.com/kertesz/

http://www.elangelcaido.org/fotografos/brassai/imagebrassai.html

http://www.agallery.com/aspx/inventory.aspx?search=&photographer=+Brassai&Sort=

http://apphotnum.free.fr/N2BE53.html

 I enjoyed this exhibition enormously, the variety, the substance. I felt at home and comfortable with the genre.