In this year’s
final episode of Under the Influence—
Artforum’s series of videos in which artists discuss the ideas, events, works, and people that have been crucial to their development—the trailblazing Conceptual artist Martha Rosler
reflects on the peers and predecessors who most closely influenced her life and art. This week, alongside that interview,
Artforum revisits
Rosler’s first contribution to the magazine, an essay on Lee Friedlander’s “guarded strategies,” published in the April 1975 issue.
“Lee Friedlander’s photos are in a sense exemplary. Their cool, gentle disdain places them at a crossing point between photography and high art, where meaning can be made to shift and vanish before our eyes,”
Rosler writes. “In moving toward ‘vernacular’ photo images, photography has had to confront some of the issues behind Realism, such as whether a photograph is in any sense a document and, if so, what kind. Is it ‘about’ what it shows concretely, metaphorically, representatively, allegorically? Does it refer to a moment alone? If so, how long a moment? Does it reveal only that moment, or does it indicate past and future as well? Or, is a photo a record of sensibility, or, is it most specifically about photography itself? These are metacritical questions about the range of messages a photo can convey as well as about how it signals what it signals. These questions are both contentual and formal, and they are all at issue in Friedlander’s work.”
—The editors
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