Lee Friedlander – Central Park – Frederick Law Olmsted – Art – New York Times Annotated

 

since Robert Smithson, the earthwork pioneer, declared that he found Olmsted more interesting than Duchamp, Olmsted’s creations — particularly his most famous, Central Park — have been revered as a kind of early conceptualism, carefully constructed visions of the pastoral woven into the urbanizing heart of America. Olmsted championed natural simplicity and the curative powers of communing with it,

 

 

the photographer Lee Friedlander, best known for his relentless exploration of the American vernacular

 

 

Beginning Jan. 22, 40 of the black-and-white photographs that have resulted from that fascination, most never before on display, will go on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the exhibition “Lee Friedlander: A Ramble in Olmsted Parks,”

 

 

While the exhibition might read like a straight-ahead study of landscape portraiture, it is also part of a long line of work by photographers who have turned their lenses on other artists’ works:

 

their mutual belief in the rewards of paying attention and looking at the world.

 

“Friedlander is someone who reminds me of the pleasure of seeing itself,” Mr. Rosenheim

 

he’s seeing these places as kinds of living works of art,” he added.

 

 

Olmsted wrote that “a great object of all that is done in a park, of all the art of a park, is to influence the mind of men through their imagination.”

 

 

He likes to make that picture plane just completely dense with both meaning and stuff. He doesn’t shy away from any of what you might call bold and intense complexities.”

 

“The subject itself,” he wrote of landscape, “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.

 

Lee Friedlander:

A Ramble in Olmsted Parks” will run Jan. 22 through May 11 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (212) 535-7710 or metmuseum.org.