Lee Friedlander’s Paper Dolls

When you open Lee Friedlander’s new book “Mannequin”, the magic of its images transports you suddenly to the sidewalk of Madison Avenue, downtown Manhattan, in New York City the Bid Apple. You put on your headphone and switch on your iPod then you can start walking in the rhythms of Gershwin’s Rhapsodies in Blue, especially the version of 1924 with the composer at the piano, and light-heartedly and high-spiritedly you follow Lee Friedlander to a window shopping tour along the line-up of boutiques and flagship stores; the Barney’s, the Ann Taylor’s, Calvin Klein, Jimmy Choo, Carolina Herrera, Donna Karan, Gucci, Prada, Ralph Lauren, you name it. But do we barely pay attention to those mannequins behind the shop-windows? Like fashion-victims we are, we stand mesmerized by the debauchery of glitzy designer clothes, designer shoes and accessories before our eyes…
Born in 1934, three years before George Gershwin passed away, Lee Friedlander is one of the last still standing and shooting greats among the celebrated 20th century American photo-masters. He has dedicated his whole life, since high school, to this art of catching shadows and lights, still using roll-film cameras and in a classical yet unconventional, documentary yet totally and radically innovative style. And after photography, music and jazz music in particular is his passion; in the 1950’s and 1960’s Lee has photographed countless jazz musicians, among them Count Basie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Ray Charles. The very jazzy book “Mannequin”, is typically in Lee Friedlander’s style, a pure “pleasure to the eye” photography book, in a 110-page hard-cover edition there are only 103 plates in black & white, without any boring academic foreword nor biography or other superfluous texts. It opens in eye-catching fuchsia pink with, in big fluorescent green letters on black, the lyric of a 1944 phenomenal radio hit song and best selling record “Paper Dolls” by the Mills Brothers, one of the greatest successes of the swing era with big band sounds and rhythms:
“I’m gonna buy a Paper Doll that I can call my own,
A doll that other fellows cannot steal
And then the flirty, flirty guys with their flirty, flirty eyes
Will have to flirt with dollies that are real
When I come home at night she will be waiting
She’ll be the truest doll in all this world
I’d rather have a Paper Doll to call my own
Than have a fickled-minded real live girl”

That does not mean that Lee Friedlander is going to show us some hanky-panky “paper dolls” to our “flirty, flirty eyes”. While we walk down the Madison or the Fifth Avenue, we get to keep playing a compilation-mix with the uplifting Frank Sinatra’s “New York New York” by Leonard Bernstein, the melancholic “Downtown” by Petula Clark (“Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city…”), the heart-breaking “Almost Blue” by Chet baker, and finally the never-ending whining love song of Diana Ross singing with the Supremes “Baby Love” which makes the browsing of the window mannequins lined up by Lee Friedlander so much more alive and individually appealing. Jazz and photography do share a common point which is improvisation. After setting the storefront window as a frame, Lee Friedlander starts improvising with the mannequins inside. They become the subject, the Paper Doll with whom Lee goes into a playful even “flirty” relationship like the one between a model and a photographer during a session of fashion shoot.
Photographing through the glass, Friedlander uses reflections of the four “S”s: the street, the sky, the sidewalk, and the shadow of himself to “dress up” the mannequin, to “decorate”, to “paint” and to “install” some surprising and surrealistic “photo-montage”. This “Doll” is dressed up with wings from the buildings across the street, and this other “Doll” in golden bikini wears a palm tree around her head, and that Angel-like Doll clad in a sexy lingerie with a cotton aura above her head grows a pair of cloudy wings on her back… in the meantime Friedlander leaves the imprints of his omnipresence all over the place, going from full acting role to playing a hide and seek game, you really need to look closer to see him. The secret is to always wear dark and roomy clothes to project a sufficient shade. Sometimes he presses against the window to project a massive dark shadow, sometimes he backs away and zoomed from a distance to let the sunshine play its interactive role with what’s in the window and what’s outside in the street. The exception is in this window shot where he can be seen in summer shirt and a white baseball cap grimacing beside his camera with his hand echoing the hand of a body-less mannequin. In the surrealistic composition a headless mannequin wearing a flowery dress is topped by winter leave-less tree branches, with the discrete dark shadow of Friedlander in the lower left corner.
Although surrealism is not part of Lee Friedlander’s influences; coming from a lineage of master street photographers such as Atget, Walker Evans and Robert Frank, he nevertheless could not have ignored the Surrealists’ International Exhibition of Surrealism in 1938, where fifteen artists such as Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro, Max Ernst, etc were given each a dressmaker’s mannequin, upon which they could add whatever they wanted and transform in any way they desired, and Man Ray was the photographer who documented the end results. In Lee’s way he manipulated his mannequin behind window, using the window glass pane as a transparent canvass on which he could paint his creative strokes and compose a symphony of urban architecture with the American consumerism as a footnote for social critique.
Eugene Atget (1857-1927) very early on in his documentary of Paris storefronts had consciously played with the reflection on the window mannequins. Hence the window has always been an important tool or prop in the art of photography. It not only sets a frame, it can create a frame within a frame, a photo inside a photo, a multiplication of scene within a scene. The interaction with reflection, Lee Friedlander has profusely exploited in the course of his fifty years of photographic career, through rear-mirrors of cars and buses, through storefront windows and glass-doors, especially when combined with his obsessive self-portraits. In the case of window mannequin, the interplay can be exhilaratingly fascinating for a photographer and for the viewer because of its multiple evocations and implications: the exhibitionism and the voyeurism which lie at the core of photography, the manifestation of the inner world as opposed to the appearances of the outer world, reality versus imagination, still-life as opposed to portrait, the rigor of geometric architectural composition with the randomness of artistic de-construction, the ancient art and tradition of illusion and trompe-l’oeil in paintings. The French have an expression for window shopping that is “leche-vitrine”, literally “window licking”, and in that sense Lee Friedlander is the greatest window licker I have known, chapeau!

While I never had a chance to meet Lee Friedlander, I have built up an imaginary portrait from my earliest impression of him since his series of self-portraits: in motel rooms, his own reflection on the television screen, his dark shadow cast on the back of blond woman’s fur coat walking ahead of him in New York City, these early self portraits seemed to me tinged with loneliness and melancholy, though with a touch of irreverence. Then as he evolved into a prolific production of images his happy nonchalance won me over, I enjoy with his distanced curiosity to people and landscapes, I even felt a dose of jealousy with his sensual exploration of the female body in his audacious work on nudes, and I appreciate his playful yet witty irony for instance in his unorthodox photographs of cactuses – full of punctums if I may volunteer a pun.
I remember vividly the contrasting double-page I saw in Aperture magazine, which was later reproduced in the Richard Avedon Retrospective which I saw in Paris Jeu de Paume, showing side by side the two masters: Friedlander’s portrait by Avedon, a lonely figure standing before a white backdrop, staring at us viewers, with his clear blue eyes, his quasi extraterrestrial ears pointing upwards and his Hasselblad camera dangling loosely around his neck and resting nonchalantly on his protruding belly; on the other side there was the portrait Lee shot of an intense and focused Richard Avedon, gesturing like a conductor and flanked by his impressive 8×10 huge camera, surrounded by a bunch of assistants each busy with his own business as if they were making a movie. Now this old pal of his – Richard Avedon – is no longer, and Lee keeps on playing, with his own brand of humor and penchant for the bizarre, best exemplified in this refreshing series of window “Mannequin”. We should enjoy it as it is: this is just a jazzy improvisation by Lee Friedlander, and we should not take it too seriously. “Don’t take life too seriously” Lee Friedlander seems to tell us.
It is no surprise then that the book ends with a quote from the Nobel awarded author Patrick White in VOSS:
“Then a horse neighed, dropped its fragrant dung, and life was resumed.”

Jean Loh 尚陸

Tags: Jazz, Lee Friedlander, Mannequin, Paper Dolls, Rhapsodies in Blue