Lee Friedlander was born in Washington on July 14, 1934. He began photographing in 1948. It was stated that "he could organize a vast amount of visual information in dynamic compositions." "He made many images funny and poignant images among the chaos of city life, dense natural landscape, and many other objects." He is also known for taking pictures of the streets. He took lots of pictures of people, signs, cars, and of himself standing in front of store windows. It was said that he did this to catch the overlapping of light in urban landscapes. Lee Friedlander stated, " he is not a premeditative photographer." He also said that "you don't go out looking for pictures. The materials are generous you go out and the pictures are staring at you."
When I looked at this picture for the first time, I had a lot of questions about it. My first question was why did this man take a picture of another man and then himself as a shadow? After a long while of just sitting and thinking about it, I came to a few conclusions. My first conclusion was that maybe he took this picture to tell us that everyone has a demon inside them. Now I thought that because of the way he took the picture. He took an up-close picture of a man which created a shadow of himself on the man. If you have ever watched a scary movie, you will sometimes know when someone is being crept upon because you will see a shadow behind them. Or if you are watching ghost adventures you will see entities move around or in and out of someone's body. So for this picture, I thought that's what he may have been trying to convey. While looking through a lot of pictures I noticed he loves to do everything with some sort of shadow. I have seen many pictures where he would use his own shadow to then add it to the picture. He does such a nice job of using all of the shadows. There was a picture I saw in New York City where he made it look like there was a giant cloud hovering over the city but in reality, it was just the way the picture looked.
Here is another picture that I find very interesting. I find it interesting how once again he used his own shadow while the city also looks dark when you know it's sunny because you can see the light. He does such a great job with the lighting of the photo but what does this photo actually mean. My guess of what this means is that light still shines through in darkness if that makes sense. I say this because in the picture you see a lot of darkness and shadows, but the sun is still shining down. What I also find in this photo along with many other photos is why does he always like to take a picture with his shadow on the man? It makes me question what the point of the photo is. Is it just to take a cool picture or is it trying to convey some sort of meaning? Who knows people will do this to get our brains moving in some way. Maybe there's only one meaning to this photo or maybe there is way more than that.
This is the last picture that I would like to evaluate. A lot is going on in this picture. First of all, the guy took a picture in what is to be some sort of car or something. He gets this picture of what looks like to be New York City. He gets this picture so clearly and so perfectly. He used the darkness of the car to really make it look like the city was clear. He still made the woman look like she was clear in the picture too. The way Lee uses black and white pictures is what I really think makes the pictures look the way they do. If these were in color, I don't feel that we would get any sort of meaning or picture to look as good as it does. Without the look of black and white, I think the picture would turn out very weird and you would see all the smog and stuff that surrounds the city rather than just the city itself.
Lee Friedlander does a great job of using black-and-white pictures. He uses black and white to create nice shadows and make you question the meanings of things. He was very good at using shadows to block out the bad stuff such as the smog around New York City. He truly is an elite.
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