The journey, the ultimate combination of physical and mental progress, can be interpreted as a version of the age-old rite of passage, that expression of the universal need to mark a fundamental change in a person’s life.
Like his illustrious predecessors, including Walker Evans and Robert Frank, Friedlander went in search, by car, of the America of his day. His project’s matter-of-fact title could not be more apt: America by Car. What distinguishes his work from that of any other photographer is his simple yet audacious decision not to get out of the car to take photos. They are all shot from inside. This transforms the car from simply an anonymous means of transport into an essential element of each picture. We always see part of the interior: a section of dashboard, the steering wheel, the frames of one or more windows. By using a Hasselblad Super Wide Camera, Friedlander was able to capture a far wider picture than would have been possible with an ordinary camera. The result is fascinating. Every photograph is transected vertically or diagonally by what is known as the A-pillar of the car. Each photo therefore consists of two rigidly bordered images. A third image often appears in the small surface of the wing mirror. To complete the complex visual puzzle, a fragmented view of the American landscape appears above the edge of the dashboard and windscreen, showing buildings, trees, billboards and occasionally a human torso. Friedlander presents images within images, reflections, fragments, a shattered picture of the outside world. Like many other series in his impressive oeuvre, America by Car comments on the potential and nature of the medium, on the complexity of our perception, and on America’s social landscape.
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This final photograph seems like a knowing wink, an homage perhaps, to Robert Frank, a photographer of Swiss origin who drove out from New York in the summer of 1955 in a Ford Business Coupe and spent a year crossing the United States. Fortunately for us, Frank took photos regularly during that year, twenty-seven thousand of them to be precise. They formed the basis for The Americans, arguably one of the most important and influential books in post-war photographic history. The last photo in the book shows Frank in his trusty vehicle, in which he had travelled tens of thousands of kilometres. But it is not so much Frank’s dark, grainy and unconventional photographs that matter here, nor the story of how all those thousands of photographs were pared down to the eighty-three that finally appeared in The Americans, nor indeed how the book came to be published by Robert Delpire in Paris. The important point is that Frank was Swiss by origin, not American. He was an outsider looking at a country that was not his own, a strange country he was not part of. His view was in some sense pure, not having been shaped by the culture of the country he had chosen to travel through. The people who supported him in his application for the Guggenheim Fellowship that enabled him to undertake his journey, who included Edward Steichen, Alexey Brodovitch and Walker Evans, had this fact very clearly in mind. In his application the stated goal of the project was to capture ‘what one naturalized American finds to see in the United States that signifies the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere’. Given that Evans had largely rewritten the original application (Frank was not yet an American citizen at the time and his English was anything but flawless) this underlines the importance attached to the view of a
theme introduction
Another important consequence of this approach is that America itself remains strangely at a distance. Along with Friedlander we look out through the window at a reality we can see but are not part of. Along with him we find ourselves safe in the car, and that other reality is literally somewhere else, outside. We look with the eyes of an outsider, an observer, at a reality presented as if in film stills from some obscure road movie, frame by frame. Only in the very last photograph in the series do we see a self-portrait of the notoriously shy Friedlander, who seems surprised that the camera has now suddenly captured him.