Customer Reviews

Lee Friedlander: The Desert Seen

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At the end of his book, The Desert Seen, Friedlander quotes from the film, "My Little Chickadee" - "A cowboy sits down to a game of cards with W.C. Fields and says, 'Is this a game of chance?' W.C. Fields responds, "No Sir, not the way I play it."

In his timeless images of the desert seen, Friedlander leaves nothing to chance. To the critic from Berea, Kentucky, look again, and keep looking again and again.

After spending the last 15 yrs. looking through Friedlanders photographs, I rate this book equal to "The American Monument", his tour de force. No photographer has ever visualized the desert "forest" as he has. He photographs the harshness of the desert light along with the harshness of its plants with his new format, the ultrawide Hasselblad. The combination of technique and his unique vision make this book groundbreaking for this artist.

Masterly photography, beautifully produced book and it includes the best essay on what it means to live as a photographer and seeker that I have read. This is deceptive work, the product of a formidable visual intelligence, and it leaves most contemporary 'art' photography eating its Sonora Desert dust. I like this book as an odyssey through a wildly beautiful landscape, with individual photographs pulling me back time and again to ponder another detail. A 'Difficult Love', but definitely a book to live with.

My favorite Friedlander book is 'Sticks & Stone: architecture America', full of wonderful urban landscape photos that only he could have taken. I only mention the book because several shots in that book of close-ups of chain-link fencing (one of Lee's little foibles) with untended foliage behind have a hint of what is in this book. The ninety-four photos capture the raw desert wilderness in all its prickly splendor.

Page after page reveal a collage of small trees with twisted branches, bushes, straggly grass on a scrub ground and prickles and thorns everywhere. Sometimes huge majestic cacti, that seem a little out of place because their controlled shape, swing into many of these photos. Stand in this desert landscape and most of us would be hard pushed to find anything of visual interest but turn over these pages and just be amazed at how Friedlander has created a kaleidoscope of shapes and texture with his clever technique of layering it all away from the viewer.

The book's format does contribute to the success of these photos. They are just over ten inches square and long time Friedlander photo printer Thomas Palmer has done his usual magic by creating the perfect tri-tone separations for the printers (300 screen on a matt art). A nice touch was increasing the contrast to give them a slightly bleached-out look which enhances the feel of the desert. Katy Homan's (another Friedlander regular) did a lovely page design for the book.

If you don't care for Lee Friedlander's work this book will probably not interest you. I think it's for his fans that love and appreciate his playful approach capturing what most of us just can't see in front of our eyes.

***LOOK INSIDE THE BOOK by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.

There was a shift during the early decades of the 20th century in photography. This shift ushered in "modern photography". In the world of landscapes, this modern bent was expressed conservatively in the early "ultimate expression" typified by Ansel Adams. Folks like the Westons (esp. Edward and Brett) took some of that a step further.

Friedlander has taken things into a new realm, without becoming a post-modern landscape photographer, in the process. Sure, there is a sum-is-greater-than-the-parts quality to his work -- and that carries over into this, for him new, realm. But where at first glance one might not note masterpieces on the kind modern photography has produced, closer inspection reveals brilliantly hidden agendas lying just below the surface of key prints in this collection.

The joy of this work comes from being able to approach it from both directions -- as a whole, and as unique parts. In the realm of "as a whole," one finds an implicit argument for a kind of printing too-long-out-of-vogue. There is a pricision of technique here that is umistakable. Also beyond question: The technique is nothing if not reminiscient of the kinds of early-modern aesthetics one finds in, for example, the work of Paul Strand from the late teens.

The result? Freidlander not only celebrates photography and the ability to capture and create something from the world. He also brings out the abstract insights that form and feeling draw forth in a fashion analogous -- to use his own analogy -- to the best of improvisational music. In improv, as in this work, there is the feeling that while some portions would appear grand on their own, and other portions would appear less so -- the whole, on the other hand, appears to be even greater than the best of its parts.

And it is, for many of us, the celebration of the greatness of "the whole" that we find in the world's best art that makes that art great.

This is one of the worst photographic books I have ever seen. The technical quality of the reproductions is lousy (with the highlight areas burnt out to excess) and the photographs themselves are uninteresting and cluttered with desert scrub and cactus. There does not seem to have been any thought put into these images, but the camera simply pointed in the direction of the subject matter, giving one a hodgepodge of sticks, thorns, rocks and dirt.There is no particular center of interest, with the eye shifting aimlessly from twig to twig to twig to thorn to twig, etc. None of the photographs are particularly memorable, and I believe a child could heve taken these photographs and one would not be able to tell the difference.

Do you only put on positive reviews ? This book was awful and I think people should know about it. My review was not pornographic or offensive in any way - where is it ?