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Can Spike Lee Friedlander do a bad photograph?
Perhaps, but if he did we probably could not tell, so completely have his work redefined, for those who cognize it, the sense of what do a image worth taking. If his retrospective, gap today at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, have a downside, it may be to give false assurance to inexperienced photographers. Friedlander do everything photographic - from lament to cultural observation to landscape and self-satire - look easy.
Friedlander's images hang arrayed here in thematic groups, in roughly chronological order. Some groups, such as as self-portraits, come up labeled, echoing their aggregation in book form. Vitrines in the exhibition incorporate pristine transcripts of Friedlander's most of import publications.
Other bunches challenge the viewer's oculus to link them, including four in a perpendicular row that have got mental images of things blown into, or out of, shape: a ill-proportioned tree, a wind-wrecked hairdo, a headland of cloud and a downy dog, images taken old age and many statute miles apart.
Did Friedlander recollect or seek out these household resemblances among mental images as he carried on working? Did he topographic point them only later? Or makes their grouping here merely stand for the intercession of Simon Peter Galassi, picture taking conservator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which originated the retrospective?
Such inquiries substance because, looked at individually, none of the four images amounts to much. We might state the same of many other person mental images on view. Give Friedlander recognition for never overestimating the significance of a single shot. He apparently experiences no ambivalency about the Romaic nature of his medium. Yet viewed en bloc, his images arouse a distinct, possibly personal, manner of encountering and remembering the world.
I state "encountering" the human race and not "seeing" it, because Friedlander have practiced picture taking openly as a constructive fine art almost from the beginning.
I state "possibly personal" because Friedlander understands both by experience and inherent aptitude the fluctuating, perhaps inestimable, objectiveness quotient of photography.
The photographic camera work stoppages a short letter of impersonality, of automatism, every clip it operates. A astute photographer such as as Friedlander, who learned his chops doing magazine work and street picture taking at the same time, works back from the baseline assurance that the photographic camera inspires in its viewing audience - or inspired, before digital engineering cast of characters a shadow of intuition on all things pictorial.
We accept an mental image such as as "Nashville, Tennessee" (1971) as an instantaneous written document of societal world because everyone in it - maybe even Friedlander himself behind the lens system - looks taken by surprise. And because it looks to do no averment about what it records, unless we care about the importance ascribed to highly coiffed hair at a certain American topographic point and time.
But expression at a recent picture, such as as "New House Of York City" (2002) in the Fraenkel Gallery's coincident Friedlander show, "America by Car," and you recognize immediately that his photographic camera have constructed a minute of layered, colliding ocular positions that the oculus unaided could never assemble, allow alone fix.
We might see "Friedlander," the retrospective, as trailing a career-long disproof of any presumed equality between seeing the human race and seeing the human race as photographed. Yet Friedlander works as if he have no ideological interest in this truth, merely a captivation with it, a captivation continually reawakened as different topics come up before his camera.
He have frequently returned to or stayed with the same or similar topics for a stretch of time, as in his series "American Monuments," "Nudes" and shots taken backstage behavior at a manner show, an improver to this locale of the retrospective's tour.
In the manner series from 2006, we see glamor getting fabricated, as hairstylists, constitution people and chests of drawers waver around waifish theoretical accounts like a race path cavity crew, readying them for the runway.
The fulgurant formalism of "The Desert Seen" series suffuses the manner pictures. They nearly disperse the unfamiliarity of their societal content through shots so brilliantly timed and aimed that they asseverate themselves as abstract structures.
Friedlander's wont of identifying his images only by topographic point name calling and days of the month makes the feeling of an creative person perpetually on the road.
Yet the retrospective neither shows nor brings on restlessness. Just the opposite. It do you experience that if you analyze Friedlander's work carefully enough, you can larn to see as he sees, even without a viewfinder. To make this feeling may be his true artistic magic act.
Friedlander: photos and books. Through May 18. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., San Francisco. (415) 357-4000, .
Lee Friedlander: United States by Car: photographs. Through April 26. Fraenkel Gallery, 49 Geary St., San Francisco. (415) 981-2661, .
E-mail Kenneth Baker at .