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Two markedly different New York
exhibitions, of work by Sze Tsung Leong and Lee Friedlander, test the
potential of landscape photography as a vehicle for the exploration of diverse
– global, local, political and pictorial - concerns
SzeTsung Leong spent his childhood between Mexico,
Britain and the United States –
perhaps the experience contributed to the pronounced global aspect of his recent
photography. A new series Horizons, on show at New
York’s Yossi Milo Gallery (until May 17), includes pictures made
in Inner Mongolia, Italy,
the Isle of Skye, Jordan, India and Germany.
Using an 8 x 10 inch view camera, and a variety of medium formats, Leong
has produced a series of unobstructed landscape images, often from an elevated
viewpoint, that range from cityscapes to wilderness. The sheer diversity of
locations and subjects – industrial or agrarian, poverty-stricken or wealthy,
peopled or desolate, new-build or ancient – might be expected to deliver a
similarly diverse set of pictures.
Canale della Giudecca I, Venezia, 2007 © Sze Tsung Leong, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery
But Leong’s photographs are deliberately constructed to impose a unity,
of sorts, on the scenes surveyed. This is achieved most obviously by the
repeated positioning of the pictorial horizon in the same place (about a third
of the way up the frame) in each image. Viewed on the gallery wall, where the
pictures are uncaptioned and closely abutted, the same interchangeable horizon
appears to run through far-flung, and proximate, locations.
Avebury I, 2002 © Sze Tsung Leong, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery
The resulting homogeneity, and the collapsing of geographical distance,
are strategies designed to provoke a consideration of the contingency and
fluidity of the relations between cultures and regions, As Leong writes in an
accompanying essay: “The drifting horizon reveals the tendency for the
arbitrariness of distinctions, the randomness of orders. Political borders, for
example, rarely delineate essences – they are only the boundaries that overlap
in the most dominant way…Any way we divide up the world will overlap with other
orders…As a result, the boundaries of what we consider the local need not be
limited to physically confined, specific places – the local can be mobile and
dispersed.”
In contrast to the epic and
global scale of Horizons, Lee
Friedlander’s A Ramble in Olmsted Parks
(at the Metropolitan
Museum until May 11) explores
the possibilities of a determinedly personal, local investigation of landscape
photography.
Though the putative subject
of Friedlander’s pictures is the park designs of landscape architect Frederick
Law Olmsted, his photographs pursue compositional and pictorial themes that
have been evident in much of his work, in a variety of locations, since the
1980’s. That said, familiarity does nothing to detract from the bewilderingly complex,
astute and decentred compositions of sharply-rendered webs of branches and veils
of twigs
Cherokee, Louisville, Kentucky, 1993
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Olmsted was responsible for
many of North America’s nineteenth century public and private urban spaces -
amongst them the Capitol building landscape, Washington Park, New York’s
Central Park, Chicago’s’ Jackson Park and Louisville’s Cherokee Park.
Friedlander’s interest in his designs appears to have been sparked by an
initial commission for the Canadian Centre for Architecture; yet his
photography continued long after completion of the brief.
To the extent that the
Olmsted photographs reveal interests that are evident in similar Friedlander
projects - of cherry blossom in Tokyo, apple
orchards in New York, olive groves in Spain, or cacti in Arizona – they bear witness to the
possibilities and benefits of an unflinching, concentrated and extended
exploration of formal pictorial concerns. In his own words, he “needed to use
all that I had learned, every trick, my best gear, whatever wit I was capable
of, and I had to be as sharp and aware and immediate as a spark.”
Cherokee, Louisville, Kentucky, 1994.
©
Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery
Despite the very different motivations
that animate their landscape photography, Friedlander and Leong share an
awareness of the impossibility of their enterprises. Leong describes his own
photographs as “incomplete fragments”. While for Friedlander: “Landscape! The
subject of landscape as a photographic possibility is both pleasurable and very
difficult. The subject itself is simply perfect, and no matter how well you
manage as a photographer, you will only ever give a hint as to how good the
real thing is.”
Guy Lane
Sze Tsung Leong, Horizons,
(until May 17, 2008)
Yossi Milo
Gallery 525 West 25th Street, New York
Lee
Friedlander: A Ramble in Olmsted Parks (until May 11, 2008)
The Metropolitan Museum, 1000 5th Avenue, New York
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