{"id":3440,"date":"2010-12-11T19:56:48","date_gmt":"2010-12-11T18:56:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jlggb.net\/blog2\/?p=3440"},"modified":"2024-10-16T10:08:47","modified_gmt":"2024-10-16T09:08:47","slug":"america-by-car","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jlggb.net\/blog2\/?p=3440","title":{"rendered":"America by Car"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nSamedi 11 d\u00e9cembre 2010. Achet\u00e9 lundi 6 d\u00e9cembre, le nouveau (grand) livre de Lee Friedlander, America by Car, <\/em>D.A.P.\/Fraenkel Gallery, 2010. Plus de 200 photos faites en 15 ans, o\u00f9 se confirme l’affinit\u00e9 de l’appareil photo avec la voiture, comme v\u00e9hicules, machines de vision, instruments de cadrage, dispositifs de construction, de collecte et d’assemblage d’images. Friedlander revisite l’histoire de la photographie am\u00e9ricaine (Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, etc.) et sa propre photographie (monuments, b\u00e2timents, enseignes, pancartes, arbres, branchages, grillages, visages, miroirs, ombres, autoportraits, etc.)<\/p>\n

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\nLee Friedlander, Montana<\/em>, 2008, de la serie America by Car<\/em>, 1995-2009. Gelatin silver print, 38.1 x 38.1 cm. Collection of the artist; courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco<\/a> \u00a9 Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.<\/p>\n

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\nDocuments int\u00e9ressants \u00e0 propose de l’impression du livre le 16 juin 2010 chez Meridian Printing (East Greenwich, Rhode Island) sur une presse Heidelberg Speedmaster (DR) : en lien ici<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\nLee Friedlander par Richard Avedon.<\/p>\n

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\n<\/a>L’appareil employ\u00e9 par Friedlander, un Hasselblad Superwide, avec un angle de vue en diagonale de 91 degr\u00e9s.
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Un article du New York Times<\/em> sur \u00ab America by Car \u00bb, exposition \u00e0 New York au Whitney Museum of American Art, automne 2010 :
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\nART REVIEW
\nSlide show : http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/slideshow\/2010\/09\/02\/arts\/design\/20100903-cars-slideshow.html<\/a>
\nLandscapes Framed by a Chevy<\/span>
\nBy KAREN ROSENBERG
\nPublished: September 2, 2010<\/p>\n

If you were a serious photographer in the 1960s, a Robert Frank or a Garry Winogrand crisscrossing the country on a Guggenheim grant, you needed a car as much as your Leica. But what if Mr. Frank, or Winogrand, had never left the wheel? That perverse thought seems to have inspired a recent series by another photography great, Lee Friedlander. Mr. Friedlander\u2019s \u201cAmerica by Car\u201d has just been published in book form and, starting on Saturday, will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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Mr. Friedlander took his black-and-white, square-format photographs entirely from the interior of standard rental cars \u2014 late-model Toyotas and Chevys, by the looks of them \u2014 on various road trips over the past 15 years. In these pictures our vast, diverse country is buffered by molded plastic dashboards and miniaturized in side-view mirrors.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t expect the photographs \u2014 192 in all, packed into the Whitney\u2019s fifth-floor mezzanine in Mr. Friedlander\u2019s characteristically dense style \u2014 to cohere into an \u201cOn the Road\u201d-style narrative. Mr. Friedlander groups images by subject, not geography: monuments, churches, houses, factories, ice cream shops, plastic Santas, roadside memorials.<\/p>\n

So \u201cAmerica by Car,\u201d organized by Elisabeth Sussman, the Whitney\u2019s photography curator, is more of an exercise in typology, along the lines of Ed Ruscha\u2019s \u201cTwentysix Gasoline Stations.\u201d But there\u2019s nothing deadpan or straightforward about the way Mr. Friedlander composes his pictures. He knows that cars are essentially illusion factories \u2014 to wit: \u201cObjects in the mirror are closer than they appear.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of the illusions on view here exploit the technology of the camera Mr. Friedlander has been using since the 1990s, the square-format Hasselblad Superwide (so named for its extra-wide-angle lens). The Superwide produces crisp and detail-packed images that are slightly exaggerated in perspective, giving the foreground \u2014 the car \u2014 a heightened immediacy.<\/p>\n

As Peter Galassi, the Museum of Modern Art\u2019s chief photography curator, wrote in the catalog for Mr. Friedlander\u2019s 2005 retrospective, \u201cIt was the maw of the Superwide that suggested to Friedlander that he add to his already overstuffed inventory the bulbous plastic landscape of the contemporary automobile interior.\u201d The aggressive foreshortening in many of the pictures is amplified by compositional sleights of hand. In many cases Mr. Friedlander photographs a building head-on and aligns its bottom edge with the windshield or window, effectively eliminating the picture\u2019s middle ground. (Think of Old Hollywood road scenes, with moving projections and stationary cars.)<\/p>\n

Meanwhile the rear-view and side-view mirrors intrude on the main image as televisions do in his 1960s photographs. They might show a house or a patch of sky or, in a few cases, the photographer and his camera.<\/p>\n

Other parts of the car \u2014 the steering wheel, the door, the radio \u2014 frequently cut across the picture. Sometimes they bring a comforting structure to a chaotic intersection or industrial scene; at other times they obstruct a picturesque view (of a New England church, or a Rocky Mountain landscape).<\/p>\n

Some of the photographs are dizzyingly complex, like one taken in Pennsylvania in 2007. The camera looks out through the passenger-side window, at a man whose feet appear to be perched on the door frame. He is standing in front of a trompe l\u2019oeil mural of a train, which seems to be heading right at the car. In the side-view mirror you can see a woman approaching. It\u2019s a bizarre pileup of early cinematic trickery (as in the Lumi\u00e8re Brothers), amateur photography and surveillance technology.<\/p>\n

Mr. Friedlander\u2019s love of such layering can be traced to Walker Evans and Eug\u00e8ne Atget. He also shares, in this series, Evans\u2019s wry eye for signs of all kinds: the matter-of-fact \u201cBar\u201d advertising a Montana watering hole, or the slightly more cryptic \u201cME RY RISTMAS\u201d outside a service station in Texas. He strikes semiotic gold at Mop\u2019s Reaching the Hurting Ministry in Mississippi: \u201cLIVE IN RELATIONSHIP ARE LIKE RENTAL CARS NO COMMITMENT.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cars distance people from one another, this series reminds us over and over. When Mr. Friedlander photographs people he knows \u2014 the photographer Richard Benson, or the legendary MoMA curator John Szarkowski (to whom the book is dedicated) \u2014 he remains in his seat, shooting through an open window. In just a few instances the subjects poke their heads inside, a gesture that seems transgressive in its intimacy.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s distance too between Mr. Friedlander and the social and political subject matter that captivated Mr. Frank. His camera lingers on Civil War monuments but generally shies away from contemporary battles, except for the odd American flag or \u201cObama-Biden\u201d bumper sticker. And his itinerary apparently didn\u2019t include New Orleans, or Detroit.<\/p>\n

He did drive through the Rust Belt, passing factories in Akron, Ohio, and houses in Cleveland that look very much like the ones in Depression-era paintings by Charles Burchfield (on view elsewhere in the museum). But in almost every case the car is a kind of shield that deflects empathy.<\/p>\n

Did he ever get out of the vehicle? Just once in this series, for a self-portrait. It\u2019s the last picture, and it shows him leaning into the driver\u2019s-side window, elbow propped on the door, left hand reaching for the steering wheel.<\/p>\n

Maybe he was thinking of the last image in \u201cThe Americans\u201d \u2014 a shot of Mr. Frank\u2019s used Ford taken from the roadside, showing his wife and son huddled in the back seat. In Mr. Frank\u2019s photograph the car is a protective cocoon. Mr. Friedlander seems to see it that way too, but from the inside out.
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\n\u201cLee Friedlander: America by Car\u201d continues through Nov. 28 at the Whitney Museum of American Art; (212) 570-3600, whitney.org.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Samedi 11 d\u00e9cembre 2010. Achet\u00e9 lundi 6 d\u00e9cembre, le nouveau (grand) livre de Lee Friedlander, America by Car, D.A.P.\/Fraenkel Gallery, 2010. Plus de 200 photos faites en 15 ans, o\u00f9 se confirme l’affinit\u00e9 de l’appareil photo avec la voiture, comme v\u00e9hicules, machines de vision, instruments de cadrage, dispositifs de construction, de collecte et d’assemblage d’images. … Continuer la lecture de America by Car<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,74,112,90,211],"tags":[504],"class_list":["post-3440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-livre","category-monument","category-photographie","category-transport","category-vue","tag-lee-friedlander"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jlggb.net\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jlggb.net\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jlggb.net\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jlggb.net\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jlggb.net\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3440"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jlggb.net\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8505,"href":"https:\/\/jlggb.net\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3440\/revisions\/8505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jlggb.net\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jlggb.net\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jlggb.net\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}