It is worth reading John Camp‘s post ‘Lee Fridelander in Minneapolis‘ on The Online Photographer
not for what it tells you about the photographer and his work (rather little – as he says “Friedlander is a photographer who I never quite got hold of“) but for the questions it raises about showing photographs in galleries and in particular about print size and the current fashion for large prints. The post is also developing a lively series of comments, many of interest.
I’ve always thought that photography is at its best as an intimate medium, one best suited to presentation in a book or magazine, or by leafing through piles of prints (and – for those of us with high-quality screens – by viewing high resolution images on line, though for very obvious reasons few photographers make their pictures generally available in this way.) Most of the memorable shows I’ve seen have also been in relatively small galleries rather than the giant halls of some major museums, although these can be made to work by breaking them up in a suitable fashion.
Walking round events such as ‘Paris Photo’ where dealers from around the world display their more saleable works some stands are filled by huge images, but those more crowded with viewers are those with smaller works on display. Of course that means there is more to look at, which takes longer, but I think it is more than this. There does seem – with a few notable exceptions – to generally be an inverse relationship between size and interest in photographs.
Or perhaps it is just that there are just the same proportion of ordinary or not very interesting images irrespective of size, but that size makes the boring seem even more so?
The post also refers to the large images of Richard Prince, stolen from photographers such as Sam Abell and gives a link to a video where he talks in a very measured way about his feelings on seeing his work used in this way. When Abell says that what Prince does is legal, I wonder if that is the case in other countries where – unlike the USA – moral rights are taken more seriously. There might be some interesting and possibly rewarding work for lawyers there.
You can see an interesting selection of Friedlander‘s photographs through an image search on Google, but the best collection of his work is probably on Artnet though you can see some more organised slide shows at the Fraenkel Gallery which misrepresents the photographer and provided the work for Artnet. Unfortunately the several pieces I’ve written about his work are no longer available on line, but one day I’ll perhaps get round to a new essay.