Friedlander Exhibit at the Akron Museum of Art
We visited the Lee Friedlander exhibition at the Akron Museum of Art today. For those of you who don’t know this, the Museum sponsored a series of photos by Friedlander, depicting factory valleys, factories, and life around them in the late 1970s/early 1980s. The pictures we saw were all taken around 1979/1980.
In his typical fashion, while carefully composed, to the naked eye they look like snapshots. Sometimes bad snapshots. I made the rounds twice or so, until it finally hit me what makes them remarkable (yes, I AM slow sometimes). They just look like (sometimes badly composed) snapshots, but they are not. They look like photos “everyday” folks would take, and subconsciously those everyday folks might hit the subject the same way. Yet, Friedlander not only offers a lot of irony in some of them, he turns the normalcy and seeming flaws of those everyday snapshots on their head.
One photograph especially stood out to me. It shows a young man in work clothes welding. He’s got all the trimmings, down to the goggles. Yet, he leans on that table with the torch as if it were a cigarette, in the other hand he could have a beer, sweet talking to a woman at the bar. In short, the pose doesn’t fit what he’s doing, which I think was exactly Friedlander’s point.
Gotta love it. I’m still not sure what to make of the warbled branch photos in the Cleveland exhibit (see my related older post), but at least I’ve gotten this far. I think part of me is probably too pictoral. Oh well, if that’s my only fault… 
