The Case for Clutter

By Richard Lacayo

The big, cartwheeling Lee Friedlander retrospective that settles into the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City this week arrives just days after the very popular Diane Arbus retrospective completed its New York run at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Friedlander comes, Arbus goes. You imagine them saluting each other with whistle blasts like ships passing at sea. That's in part because their shows are the latest development in a process that began in 1967, when they were both introduced to a wider public in a pivotal MOMA exhibition that was entirely devoted to them and a third relative newcomer, Garry Winogrand. They were by no means artists of the same stripe, but John Szarkowski, who was then MOMA's supremely influential photo curator, rightly saw that all three were turning the practices of documentary photography, as he said simply, "toward more personal ends." What he might have said was that they were entirely discarding the conventions of that kind of photography--easy-to-grasp, socially concerned images of David Douglas Duncan or W. Eugene Smith--to enter a realm that was a whole lot stranger.

In the years that followed, Arbus, with her I-dare-you-to-look pictures and her untimely death by suicide, would become a legend. Winogrand, who died in 1984, and Friedlander, now 70, settled for becoming enormously influential photographers. But it's only now, with this MOMA show of 500-plus images, that we understand how fiercely delightful and original Friedlander is. If a sophisticated notion of what a picture can look like, the continuous construction of new avenues of feeling, and sheer, sustained inventiveness are the measures we go by, then Friedlander is one of the most important American artists of any kind since World War II.

Unlike Arbus, who distilled every image down to a single, devastating idea, Friedlander loves the muchness of the world. He loves the haphazard multitude of things that can pop up in every picture--street signs, sunbeams, bits of roofline, a jagged shadow--all colliding and contradicting one another. In his breezy but very acute introduction to the show's catalog, Peter Galassi, MOMA's chief curator of photography, gets it just right when he says some of Friedlander's pictures give you the impression that "the physical world had been broken into fragments and reconstituted under pressure at three times its original density."

That's not a bad way to describe Cincinnati, Ohio, 1963, a teeming meditation on that much contested ground, the American Dream. A bedroom set greets us in a store window. At its foot there's a slapdash cornucopia of consumer goods: radios, a record player, power tools. In the upper half of the frame, which reports a reflection in the window, we see a twilit slice of Main Street, U.S.A., where a trusty lamppost rises like a beacon and a church steeple makes its dogged case for the spiritual life. Now look deeply into the center of the image to find its tiny punch line. A single glowing word, CASHIER, beckons from roughly the point where the picture's diagonals converge, as if to suggest that a ringing register is the nexus through which the real energies of American life flow. What church bell could compete?

Friedlander is fascinated by details like that, by how the meaning of an image can be brought to a head--or, even better, made more ambiguous--by its smallest elements. He also helped redefine the knucklehead weirdness of snapshot photography as a powerful new aesthetic. The foregrounds washed out by flash, the figures cut off by the edge of the picture, the odd foot that pokes into the frame--like Jimi Hendrix, turning the "error" of amplifier feedback into another kind of guitar riff, Friedlander used those "gaffes" to get places where mere perfection could never take him. His pictures, with their lyrical congestion, don't resolve into a single meaning. They have a dozen. Not one of them is the last word.