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Photography and the Aesthetics of Abstract Painting

This paper reframes Lee Friedlander’s work and the rationale as to why it has the status it holds in the face of perceived inadequacies in its extant contemporary theorising, both art critically (Greenberg et al) and institutionally (texts from MOMA New York).

The paper argues that at a time when judgments about quality of the visual were premised on the ‘essence’ and ‘specificity’ of media (Greenberg, Fried etc), the recurrent strategies through which Friedlander’s works can be read to assert their facticity as photographs, their presence as two-dimensional surfaces simultaneously with their presence as illusionistic images already had a currency as signifiers of surface and flatness in American Abstract painting of the 1950s and 1960s.

Martha Rosler’s paper on Friedlander, “Guarded Strategies”, (Artforum, April 1975) commented that “Most of the issues of painterly ‘’design” within a rectangular format turn up in his photos”. However, Rossler only goes on to name and explore two incidents of those: “echoes of analytic Cubism’ and “collage”. Here it is shown that in addition to the use of reflections and of framing which give rise to the disruption of space which Rosler articulated, there are, within various of the photographs’ compositional form, analogies with the works of Pollock, Newman, Still, and Gottlieb. It concludes that though in the Sixties constituting a kind of heresy, the incorporation of painting strategies into photographs has aesthetically located Friedlander’s work in an art culture frame: one might also see it as a precedent for the work and (art) status of Gursky in which similar visual tropes are deployed. This is providing a base for further work on Saul Leiter’s colour photographs from the same period. The paper is now published and available at: www.americansuburbx.com/2013/06/lee-friedlander-photography-and-the-aesthetics-of-abstract-painting.html