Flâneuring by car: Lee Friedlander

" The pictures make me realize that

I am interested in something."

(Lee Friedlander)

In this affirmation, in this forced delegation to a few images of his eventual involvement in the world around him, we can find one of the keys to interpreting Lee Friedlander's photographic style.

An act of mediated perception, first through the camera's viewfinder, then from the result of a shot. It is a "looking through", which Friedlander, like other photographers, uses as a visual translation of his detached perception of reality and the surrounding space.

In 2008, Friedlander published "America by car", one of his most famous photographic works and the closest interpretation to that idea of psychogeographic wandering and flaneuring that I am deepening in my research.

from http://magazine.photoluxfestival.it/lee-friedlander-america-by-car/,
accessed on 11/11/2022

The American photographer, like Robert Frank, Walker Evans, and Stephen Shore, but also David Byrne, embarks on a journey through 50 American states and chooses the car as his means of transport.

from http://magazine.photoluxfestival.it/lee-friedlander-america-by-car/,
accessed on 11/11/2022

The cockpit of the car is a point of view. Car windows, windshields and rear-view mirrors are an artistic and philosophical idea of "world view", which we can find in Patrick Keiller with his static or moving video shots on an escalator.

In a certain way, Friedlander relives the experience of the sixties: he takes black and white photographs of television screens in those years. Each screen, "punctum" in a composition of anonymous hotel rooms, is filmed in the act of transmitting vivid images of pop icons, political figures or minor celebrities of the time. This gives rise to his 2001 work, "The Little Screens".

The screen's theme of the window that frames the world-subject, is recurrent in Friedlander's work.

Friedlander, Lee. from https://fraenkelgallery.com/exhibitions/lee-friedlander-the-little-screens accessed 12/11/2022

"Friedlander uses the windshields and side- or rearview mirrors of cars as indirect framing devices. In effect, like his pictures of televisions, they are images of ‘little screens’."

Anton, Saul. Lee Friedlander (Afterall Books / One Work) (p.14). MIT Press. Kindle Ed.

from http://magazine.photoluxfestival.it/lee-friedlander-america-by-car/,
accessed on 11/11/2022

Friedlander's visual and philosophical choice is articulated in a complex mechanism where the image is the final result of what can be seen from the car through the lens of the camera used by the observer. It is as if Friedlander wants to be a pure outsider and introduces this complex mediation between himself and reality to be the "detached observer"- flaneur described by Baudelaire.

from http://magazine.photoluxfestival.it/lee-friedlander-america-by-car/,
accessed on 11/11/2022

When Friedlander travels and takes photographs from the car, it is as if the surrounding space engulfed the car but not the author. Between the author and the real space, there are some layers of detachment and visual mediation, but it is as if the surrounding environment entered the car through the windows to get in touch with the artist.

The car is simultaneously a means of travelling the world and a system of alienation from the world itself.

If flâneur is the incarnation of the critical eye on urban alienation, the photographs taken in this way appear as the gaze of a flâneur who alienates himself by car.

In Friedlander's work, we see traces of a modern interpretation of the flaneur, an observer of the world by means made available by progress, as effective in entering the lives of others as in isolating the observer from the real world: the car, the bus (Georges Georgiou), the plane, the nine eyes of Google Streetview cameras (Jon Rafman), the drones. Or even modern urban surveillance devices, such as crowd watchers.

When I look at the images of "America By Car", I relate them to work by Andrew Bush, "Vector Portraits" (1989-1997).

from http://andrewbush.net/vectors%202-10-08/pages/010a.htm, accessed on 11/11/2022

In Roland Barthes's terms, the "stadium" consists of the environment traversed by the car, and the "punctum" consists of the images that the driver sees scrolling through the "screens" of the car.

Again, modernity, with faster exposure times and the possibility of freezing an otherwise ever-moving world in images, provides the modern flaneur with a new and extremely volatile perspective to be re-examined through images.

"....– that in fact his photographs represent an evolving, playful and serious contemplation of the significance of the new technology."

Anton, Saul. Lee Friedlander (Afterall Books / One Work) (pp.14-15). MIT Press. Kindle Ed.