ยฉ Lee Friedlander
Lee Friedlander Didn’t Crop Himself Out
When a portfolio reaches me with the author’s shadow cropped out, the cut is often more visible than the shadow would have been. A dark corner in the lower left, a margin that doesn’t settle, a crop that breaks the geometry of the scene. The gesture of removing your own presence leaves a worse trace than the one it meant to erase. It hides a decision already made: I was there, and I want to pretend I wasn’t.
I think of Lee Friedlander, Self Portrait, 1970. Haywire Press, his own imprint, in New City, New York. Inside are six years of photographs where Friedlander is present in the frame. His shadow thrown on a wall, his figure reflected in a shop window, his silhouette cutting across a billboard in the foreground. At first, he writes in the preface, his presence both fascinated and disturbed him. Then he stopped treating it as an accident and began to keep it. Not as the subject of the photograph, as a fact of the photograph.
The difference matters. Friedlander photographs the world and accepts that the world, when you photograph it, contains you too. The shadow falling on a woman’s back in New York, 1966, doesn’t say “look who took this.” It says someone was there, behind her, with the sun on one side. The reflection in a shop window of the same city says photographer and passerby look at the same thing, from the same street, in the same instant.
Not every photograph needs the photographer in it. When your presence enters the frame, you have two roads. You take it as part of the scene, and then it says something about your relation to what you were looking at. Or you erase it, and the photograph carries a small but readable lie.
Friedlander worked six years on that shadow to recognize that street photography is never an invisible act. Someone is there, someone chooses, someone throws a shadow on the wall they are photographing. Cropping it in post is a decision. Keeping it is a decision. Both say something about you before they say anything about the scene. The first one says it worse.
Marco Savarese
Editor-in-Chief
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marco Savarese
Marco Savarese is Editor-in-Chief at Eyeshot, the independent publisher he founded in Italy in 2018. He spends most of his year reading portfolios, judging the Open Call, and editing the magazine catalogue. The reading desk is open, and he takes one-to-one Professional Reviews from photographers working seriously on long-term projects.
Who Finishes Your Photograph
NOTE #210. A photo isn’t finished until it survives to where people see it. Paul Strand chose hand photogravure for Photographs of Mexico so the printed copy kept the tonal weight of his prints. Protect the tone to the end, or the worst medium decides for you.
What the Dark Does
NOTE #209. A face lost in shadow reads as underexposed, a defect to fix. Gordon Willis kept Brando’s eyes in the dark in The Godfather and held it against the studio. Before you rescue a shadow, ask what it does; if you can say it, you decided it.
The Place After
NOTE #208. Of a huge event, often only an ordinary place is left. In On This Site (1996) Joel Sternfeld photographed fifty banal American places where violence happened, each with a line of text. Photograph the aftermath, and let the line do the work.
The Photo Made Together
NOTE #206. Street photography teaches you to steal people; there’s another way. In Malick Sidibรฉ’s Bamako studio the youth chose how to be seen. Before you take someone, ask how they’d want to look, and make the photo together.
Write Your Own Rules
NOTE #205. The thing that improves you most isn’t a new camera, it’s a short list of your own faults. Tony Ray-Jones kept a notebook of orders to himself and it shaped Martin Parr. Write your three rules and keep them in your pocket.
Watch the Master Work
NOTE #204. You don’t learn from a master’s finished prints, you learn from watching them work. In 1962 Joel Meyerowitz watched Robert Frank shoot, quit his job that day, and picked up a camera. Watch the body, not the result.
The Work Before the Name
NOTE #203. The worth of a photo and the worth of the byline are two different things. Koudelka shot the 1968 Prague invasion anonymously as ‘P.P.’ and revealed it sixteen years later. Photograph what must be photographed even when no one will know it was you.
The Subject You Run From
NOTE #202. The strongest subject you have is the one you’d rather not photograph. Ishiuchi Miyako went back to Yokosuka, the occupied base town she was taught to fear, and made it her life’s work. Point the camera where it’s uncomfortable.