Lee friedlander photographs. Garry Winogrand. Lee Friedlander / Biography & Images - Atget Photography.com. Photography has generally been defended on the ground that it is useful, in the sense that the McCormick reaper and quinine have been useful.
Excellent and persuasive arguments have been developed in this spirit; these are well known and need not be repeated here. It should be added however that some of the very best photography is useful only as juggling, theology, or pure mathematics is useful --- that is to say, useless, except as nourishment for the human spirit. When Lee Friedlander made the photograph reproduced here he was playing a kind of game. The game is of undetermined social utility and might on the surface seem almost frivolous.
The rules of the game are so tentative that they are automatically (though subtly) amended each time the game is successfully played. Papageorge interview « Alec Soth's Archived Blog. I interviewed Tod Papageorge on July 11, 2007 Alec Soth: The day after I started writing about your work online, we all learned of the death of John Szarkowski.
At first I felt awkward about continuing to dig into your work and life. But in a way Szarkowski’s death makes it all the more meaningful. Your generation is so closely identified with Szarkowski.