American Original

Friedlander: Photography, a retrospective covering more than four decades of photographer Lee Friedlander’s groundbreaking work, offers the most comprehensive look at the influential photographer’s career to date. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts is the second to last stop on the exhibit’s four-year tour through Europe and the United States, which began at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Friedlander isn’t quite as much of a household name as some of his contemporaries—Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand—but, says George Slade, artistic director of the Minnesota Center for Photography and guest curator of the MIA exhibition, Friedlander occupies a singular place in American photography. “Friedlander’s work is prolific, almost beyond measure, and suggests the boundlessness of American aspiration,” says Slade. There are many visual twists and turns from Friedlander’s early street photography to his more recent Western landscapes, both displayed in the exhibit, which includes several hundred prints and dozens of books and portfolios.

Friedlander shifted the frame just enough to tilt photography in a new direction defined more by the off-kilter and ambiguous qualities of what he describes as the American “social landscape.” That landscape encompasses everything from iconic jazz musicians of the 1960s to New York street scenes to nudes and Western landscapes to, notably, himself. The resulting images are often strange, at times amusing, and are often characterized by what Slade calls a “frisky shadow, a tired reflection, an intruding presence, a character that pops up in the oddest places.”

Friedlander is best known for long shadows or window reflections, images that imply a primary object but don’t refer directly to it. According to Slade, however, Friedlander’s oeuvre is best appreciated through multiple works that accumulate power and substance through layers of reference and the sheer volume of images. “Photography is a medium with infinite possibility; the art is often found in creating meaning out of chaotic abundance,” says Slade. “Friedlander’s work does this picture by picture, series by series, and book by book.” These collections take center stage in the MIA exhibit thanks to Slade’s diligent efforts to track down volumes, some quite rare, and display them. “Friedlander’s work gives great prominence to the function of the book, or portfolio, as a container and definer of photographic meaning,” says Slade.

The boundaries of a book make sense given the photographer’s rather incredible breadth of subject matter. That breadth speaks to a core value of Friedlander’s work. “Friedlander deserves attention for his inventive and infinite sense of photography as a medium for exploring the world,” says Slade, “for finding the extraordinary in the mundane, for delivering visual pleasure out of both familiar and strange materials.” Through Sept. 14. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2400 3rd Ave. S., Mpls., 612-870-3131