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.
If the sun goes behind a cloud, the place looks totally different. You have to regroup in a sense. If the sun changes you have to regroup in all kinds of ways, exposure-wise, how you might develop it, you have to juggle things around technically. A great day is really one of those days where there are a few clouds because here you are looking at something and you could make two different pictures from the same standpoint within a minute because of the wonderful changes that happen. So it’s not so unusual that you would go back to the same tree because it interests you. And because you’re going to hit it at a different time, you might not even recognize it. When I work in the desert, which is even more remote, I’ll have five pictures from five different years of the same cactus. And I don’t even know it until I start to print. I just go there and every year it looms up as the interesting thing.
Sometimes working with the camera, somebody does something that’s just beyond belief. Gary Winogrand takes pictures of things that in your wildest dreams you wouldn’t think could exist in the world. There’s a picture of a cow’s tongue in a cowboy’s hat that becomes a beautiful thing; it looks like a piece of architecture. In your wildest dreams you couldn’t come with that and that’s just because he was aware that it might be possible. He was there when it happened and his head worked that way. Or that couple on Fifth Avenue with the monkey that looks like a family. Nutty pictures, but the most imaginative person in the world could not come up with that set of things.
The question of where to stand is interesting. What we’re really talking about is a vantage point. If you look at amateurs or people taking pictures, they do funny things. Most people obviously don’t know where to stand. They’re standing too close, they’re contorted. They’re humorous to watch, people who photograph, especially people who aren’t in tune with their equipment, because they don’t know when they pick it up what it will do. If you work with the same equipment for a long time, you get more in tune to what is possible. But within that there are still surprises. But using a camera day after day, within a framework, I’ll do the same thing; I’ll back up and I’ll go forward with my body.
You don’t have to be a fancy photographer to learn where to stand. Basically you’re stuck within the frame and just like the person taking the picture of his family who needs to go half a foot back – well, he doesn’t step half a foot back – but on the other hand, he knows where to be if he hits it right. Now when you watch tennis you not only have the commentators, you also have the best of the old pros. You know how they repeatedly say, “Look at the way his back was formed when he took that shot.” It is really important to them. They see that as a possibility of where the thing went. Probably the same thing is true of all of us. (110-112)
Lee Friedlander, “Interview with Lee Friedlander,” Viewing Olmstead (1996)
