Chapter 2 Nowhere, Now Here: Lee Friedlander’s Self Portrait and the National Ground
In: Picturing America
Author:
Shamoon Zamir
Shamoon Zamir
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Abstract
This essay examines the relationship of self and place in Lee Friedlander’s 1970 photobookSelf Portrait. Rather than an affirmation of identity, Friedlander’s book turns out to be a dramatization of the shadowy dissolution of the self, and its visualization of the American urban landscape as a sort of no place opens on to surprising engagements with a very national sense of place and history. Friedlander’s Self Portrait proposes a changed relationship between self and place through a visual syntax that challenges legibility.