No Time
Lee Friedlander, "California 1997" (MOMA)DE: It strikes me that your images show arguments going on between many different things.
LF: Well, they're not portraits in the real sense, but they're portrayals of something that's there.
DE: You seem to make the things democratic and unified, and keep them in order, so they relate to one another.
LF: Well, the place itself does that too, you know. You're putting too much emphasis on the person that takes it . . . the place is full of order.
DE: I find one of the attractions of nature is that it's so chaotic.
LF: (laughing) Well, to each his own.
Maria
In writing about this book, I don’t attempt to discuss the photographs as photographs per se; I’m neither critic nor historian. But I cannot escape the fact that well over half my life has been lived under the medium’s umbrella. When Richard B. Woodward wrote on Lee in the 1989 Artnews, he referred to a photograph from 1970, taken in a Las Vegas motel room (plate 17), of me standing in a block of light against a dark wall, with Lee’s shadow imposed on my body. For him the picture read “as . . .a portrait of a marriage in which [Lee’s] photography has overshadowed both their lives.” In a way, all of these photographs, not just that one, were formed because photography did indeed overshadow all four of our lives. Lee can never stop looking, seeing, as the photographer he is, and his camera is never far from his hand. So, during all our family moments, outdoors or sitting around our home, eating, reading, listening to music, or even combing our hair or playing with our dogs, all those small things we hardly thought about, Lee was always seeing something that in an instant he might need to frame and record.
Viewing Olmstead
Lee Friedlander, Rockwood Hall, 1992If you take somebody like Michael Jordan, and if you said to him, “Michael at a certain point when you are running down the field and the ball comes to you, what are you going to do?” he would look at you as if you were crazy. Because there are a thousand things he could do: he could move almost anywhere or he could pass off or he could shoot or he could dribble. He wouldn’t even have a clue because he would have to see what was happening. And I think that’s very similar to photography, which I don’t think is similar to painting or writing in most cases. That little tiny moment is a beginning and an end and it has something to do with the same kind of mentality that an athlete has to use. I was watching tennis, for example. The tricks that good tennis players use, especially what happens when the ball bounces and does odd things. You couldn’t predict what you’re going to do. He’s going to serve it to you; what are you going to do? Try to hit it back. Not only try to hit it back, try to hit it in a weird way. Or some articulate way. And I think photography is stuck with those same kind of moments, especially if you’re not a studio photographer. You don’t have much control.
