Lee Friedlander at PHG
I’ve read about Lee Friedlander and seen some of his images in photography books, I’ve struggled to understand some of his compositions and what he was trying to convey but it wasn’t until I saw a larger group of his works in person at the Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver that I understood the humour behind many of them. There are images of his of course that stand alone but when he has curated them by typology into books even I can grasp the concepts. I’m not sure at what moment I came to the revelation but it was punctuated by a little laugh and surprise that I had been missing that aspect of his work. Take for example a series of landscape pictures, some of familiar locales in the Rockies, rather than taking the shot you would expect with a un obstructed foreground Freidlander purposefully places bushes and branches between us and the landscape. Seeing a single Lee Friedlander photograph in isolation I think does a disservice, his books where series are brought together do a much better job and have a visual wit to them.