Falling for New York

John Haber
in New York City

Lee Friedlander: Framed by Joel Coen

Berenice Abbott: New York Album

I have never felt terror passing Kennedy Airport on my way to Rockaway Beach. If Lee Friedlander is right, it is long since time that I should.

In a photograph from 1997, a plane on its descent seems headed right for a detached house in all the awkward modesty of southeastern Queens. This is in fact San Diego, but then everything speaks of unease, wherever you go. The airplane is unforgettable, but little more than a dark spot in a partly sunny sky, and a utility pole bisects a car in the foreground—the car pushed up against the left edge of the picture by the twin streaks of a pedestrian crossing. No pedestrian is coming, and maybe no one ever will. It is just one incident in a comedy of discovery and unease, among forty photos in Chelsea. This is "Framed by Joel Coen," who made the selection, but Friedlander at age eighty-eight has already framed America.

What is the one sure sign of an amateur photographer, apart from an excess of cats and selfies? Those shots that strain to take in the wonder of a tall building, only to have it leaning backward, as if falling over—that and an excess of sunlight and shadow. Yet Berenice Abbott, definitely no amateur, embraced them all. They turn up again and again in her 1929 New York Album, as part of the wonder and madness of the city. The Metropolitan Museum displays its pages, along with additional photos by Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Paul Grotz, and Margaret Bourke-White. She collected them for a project that she called Changing New York, as if New York could ever sit still.

Were this Friedlander, an unnatural tilt would contribute its lines to a careful, unsettling composition. For Abbott, it seems spontaneous and modern, because everything about New York had the appeal of spontaneity and modernity. The sheets themselves arrange their shots seemingly at random, cramped or with too much white space. They could almost be contact prints—and in fact she had asked Atget for access to his contact sheets a few years before. It also suggests art in which photography plays only a part, collage, and she displayed collage for her first museum exhibition. It gave her room to explore photography and to modernize her art.

Happy landing

New York has had plenty of chances to see Lee Friedlander in depth, including a mammoth retrospective at MoMA in 2005 and "America by Car" at the Whitney in 2010. I had my chance to pin him down at the time, and I do not mean to begin again, so by all means check out my review then at the link. This, though, does add something new, in a look at one image maker through the eyes of another. Coen is a filmmaker, of course, and he presents the photographer's career as an unfolding image of contemporary life. He leaps freely across space and time, to bring together motifs that for him most stand out. That makes the exhibition stand out as well.

Where the Whitney focused on the view by car, this might be America on foot but with nowhere to stand. Here the photographer is on foot, but people still have a tough time coming and going. In New York in 1963, a man heads to the right into an office building, his face up against the glass, while a woman heads to the left into hazy sunlight, but they will never meet. In Italy the next year, the arrow of a street sign points toward a more cavernous city at right, with no direction home. Will that plane make it safely onto the unseen tarmac? Happy landing.

Jim Dine, the artist, sticks out his foot in a white sock as if in a cast. He is not going anywhere, unless to fall out of the picture. You might expect a jaded, chic sense of humor coming from Coen, and Friedlander does get in his slams. At a pro-war protest, a flagpole divides a woman's face, making her smile all the more vacuous, but then shadows, poles, and stop signs divide almost everything. They also point and tilt every which way, in the emptiness of the streets and heat of a summer's day. This may not be America by car, but it is America built for cars, with that emptiness everywhere in sight.

Friedlander frames his images much like the view from a car, through a window or in a mirror. A wide-open landscape, the epitome of the American West, stretches out past by a chain-link fence, thanks to its reflection. Reflection is implicit, too, in physical pairings. He finds twin posts throughout, from Texas to the middle of the George Washington Bridge. The base of a monumental pillar in Vermont echoes the standing saint to its right and the cross in her hand. A woman crossing the street behind them seems pathetically small.

The juxtapositions and disruptions extend to interiors and still life. Maybe you just knew that the dancing girl in an ad would rest up against the woman leaning over in an image for Coney Island spaghetti chili. Maybe you expected to look out from a living room in darkness, only to see a billboard for Coca Cola. You could not, though, have known in advance what to make of a standing lamp barring the passage into sunlight—or the TV to one side and the empty chair to the other. You could not have expected, too, the TV to display only an eye. But then the photographer and you are looking, too.

Coen sees Friedlander as a cross between Robert Frank, the photographer of The Americans, and Diane Arbus, the photographer of a mental institution and the dark face of the city. I wish I could claim that insight for myself, but I overheard it in the gallery. I might add only another comparison. This is classic art photography, much as for Henri Cartier-Bresson, artfully composed and awaiting "The Decisive Moment." Only here the perfect moment is always imperfect and indecisive. It has to be, because so is America.

No direction home

Berenice Abbott had passed through the city eight years earlier on her way to Paris, in search of Modernism. Like a visitor from Europe, Winold Reis, she had found it disappointing—but then for other newcomers, too, like Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein, Paris was the place to be (and they helped make it so). She had in mind only a brief return, but now New York had caught up, and she stayed. For her, its essence had become not its landmarks, but those dizzying canyons. She photographed the Woolworth Building, but you might never recognize it, and Bryant Park, but with no trace of the famed public library behind it. She photographed Trinity Church, but at the end of a darkened Wall Street that has somehow acquired a dead end.

Maybe it reminded her of a quaint alley in Paris for Eugène Atget, but on speed, like everything else in New York. She was in a hurry herself. One may remember the album as about the Lower East Side and the financial district, well below the Greenwich Village of Edward Hopper, Alfred Stieglitz, and his influential gallery. Yet she took herself to midtown, Harlem, and Astoria, in Queens, as well. One may remember, too, the canyons as devoid of life, but she was drawn to automats and to trucks loading up at the South Street seaport. In one of her most haunting photographs, men linger in the shadows of the Third Avenue El and the glare that penetrates it.

Still, this is not documentary or street photography. The men are mere silhouettes amid the dappled highlights, and shop windows, much as for Gordon Parks decades later in Harlem, are less invitations than obstacles. She might have appreciated penny portraits from Walker Evans in the photo booths of Times Square, but her interests lay elsewhere. As she said, architecture itself connotes life. Yet she sticks to the streets, just when Margaret Bourke-White ascended to the very spire of the Chrysler Building. When she does take the elevator, it is to look down on Seventh Avenue.

The curator, Mia Fineman, displays mixed feelings about modernity. The Met mentions that Abbott worked for Man Ray in his studio, well after his first "rayograms" (or photograms), but it dwells on her approach in Montmartre to Atget and his older esthetic. In case one had any doubt of her professionalism, it also includes three of her Paris portraits. Djuna Barnes, who wrote The Book of Repulsive Women (and, of course, Nightwood), has all her daring and composure. James Joyce appears as his friends must have known him, formidable and stylish but introspective and approachable. A jazz drummer poses smiling and in action, much as in a publicity photo.

Still, it begins and ends with the album, where Abbott cuts loose. Its pages hang separately, but not their photographs, many of which might not bear up to closer scrutiny. For all the rush of New York, it feels unhurried, even with more than one hundred images. It takes up little more than a room, behind the large galleries for photography and works on paper. One has time to linger over each sheet and to pin down its locations. The city here is exhaustive but never exhausting.

The show adds a handful of prints from around 1935, again in New York. They might be blow-ups from the album, but with space to breathe. The mansions of Fifth Avenue do not yet press closely on their nearest neighbors. Still, one will remember the haunting isolation of those skyscrapers. Modernity's madness comes through not in her images alone, but in their refusal of composure. This is the city as one can still experience it, as a place to live but with no direction home.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Lee Friedlander ran at Luhring Augustine through June 24, 3023, Berenice Abbott at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through September 4.