Retiring from Everything Except Work

Michael Wolf, Real Fake Art 25, from the series Real Fake Art. (The painting is a copy of Lee Friedlander's Memphis 2003.)

 

At sixty-five I retired from everything except work.

–Lee Friedlander

Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) is one of the few artists in any medium to sustain a consistent body of influential work over five decades. The result of singular talent coupled with dogged, indefatigable effort, Friedlander has photographed almost every day since the late 1950s. More than a few of his friends have observed that for Lee Friedlander, working is the equivalent of breathing. In the pre-dawn hours he can be found in his darkroom, developing negatives, studying contact sheets, and printing. He has never had an assistant. Every Friedlander photograph in existence was printed by the artist himself, a claim that can be made for very few photographers.

(From the writeup of a Friedlander show at the Fraenkel Gallery in late 2010.)

Mike

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Fred M: "How do I convey the deep respect I have for the work of Lee Friedlander? I have numerous Friedlander books, the count of which outnumbers, by far, the collected works of any other single photographer in my book collection. Musicians, street photographs, desert plants, monuments, nudes, self portraits, landscape...and the list goes on. A photographer supremely confident in his voice and vision. And what a vision at that!"

Michael M: "Sadly I don't have any Friedlander books. What books would you recommend as a starting point?"

Mike replies: This can be difficult because many of his books are so different in subject matter. There are at least two retrospectives I know of. On is the big Museum of Modern Art compendium by Peter Galassi—I didn't care for that and actually didn't keep it, although some people like it. For me, it's too jam-packed with too many pictures and the repro quality doesn't quite meet my minimum standards. The book I still like best is getting long in the tooth as a retrospective—Like a One-Eyed Cat from 1987. Of the two, a more enjoyable book and much more integrated and cohesive as a photobook. And, unlike many older photobooks, used copies are still affordable.

You might have to take this with a grain of salt because Like a One-Eyed Cat is one of my favorite photobooks, so I might not be very objective.

Comments

[Ray]

I can't help but think that the concept sucks. I look at those photos and imagine the print, painting, whatever not being there and seeing a really intriguing, involving and interesting photograph of people in their surrounds. In so many ways, what an absolute waste of an opportunity.

[Eolake]

here's a serious question for Mike and everybody else knowledgable:

Can painters generally get away with copying somebody else's photographs and sell it as original art? It seems to me a clearcut example of plagiarism.

(I guess the same goes for photographers, as with the guy who photographed the Marboro Man ads.)

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Friedlander is one of my few heroes. He is one of the few working much more with the IMAGE than with subjects. His photos looking through trees have me breathless.

[Stan B.]

I was never a big Friedlander fan, until he took up the 2 1/4. He now seems a man afire doing the best work of his entire career- even his recent 35mm work on mannequins. And I had no idea, none whatsoever that he did all his printing!

[B.J. Segel]

I'm going off on tangent, since this comment is not about Friedlander, but your posting of the painter's copy of a Friedlander photo reminded me of the opposite: photorealistic painting. Take the work of Richard Estes (vimeo.com/99878549). He even simulates depth of field effects. Or Bert Monroy (bertmonroy.com) who does it all in Photoshop. I'm not sure what to make of it. The technique snd skill displayed are marvelous, but shouldn't a painting (or a photo) be more than about technique? I guess maybe if the images are engaging, that's all that matters; not how they are created.
Warhol, I think I understand.

[ctein]

Dear Eolake,

Under US copyright law, broadly speaking, the answer is no. The written law and the case law on this is extremely clear: simply changing the medium does not create a “new” work as defined by the copyright law–– it is merely a derivative. All derivatives are owned by the original copyright holder.

To create a new work that is not simply plagiarism, there must be something genuinely transformative in the creation. Exactly when that occurs is, of course, subject to judgment and debate, and there are 10 or a dozen different legal points one may “score” a work on to help decide if it fits the definition of transformative. A perfect example of a work that fell smack dab in the middle was the posterized Obama “Hope” poster. It would have been great if that had gone to trial, because it fell almost midway on the scale between wholly new and totally derivative, by those metrics. You could make a great case either way. A court ruling would have helped decide where the line was. Unfortunately, the artist tainted the whole process by falsifying evidence for the trial, thereby destroying the possibility of any useful outcome.

But, merely taking a photograph and rendering it as a painting (or sculpture, or silkscreen, or whatever) is absolutely not a new work––it is derivative and is plagiarism if not done with the permission of the photograph's copyright holder. And, no, in case someone wonders–– the act of rendering it in a different medium is NOT considered “commentary” or “critique” or anything else that might qualify it as a new work or protected as Fair Use. That one's been tried in court, too. It doesn't pass the sniff test.

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
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-- Ctein's Online Gallery http://ctein.com
-- Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com
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[Dave Stewart]

13th Jan 2015

"Dulwich Picture Gallery experiments with 'fake' painting."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-30793406

[G Dan Mitchell]

With my particular starting point for photography, there was a time when I didn't "get" Friedlander. Then I had a chance to see a few shows in a short period of time as some pretty good museums and it hit me what a brilliant see-er and wonderful wit he is.

[Kent Wiley]

Why is no one talking about the significance of the Wolf photos? About the Chinese cultural norm that copies every original thought produced elsewhere, from pianos to photographs? Mr. Wolf has documented a strange and intriguing aspect of this commercialized society.