Lee Friedlander Captures the City’s Hustle and Flow

If you’re walking around New York with the intention of taking photographs, you notice how different the city looks every few steps. Your progress is not a line, direct or winding, from one point to another, but a flickering series of scenes. A street is not only its tarred surface, the buildings alongside it, the cars fast or slow, the people around you. It is also the way those things relate to one another, the way they combine and recombine. As some elements slip out of view, new ones become visible: You are moving, the cars are moving, other people are moving, even the sun is moving, slowly, and in the middle of this movable feast you must decide when to press the shutter, decide which of these rapidly refreshing instants is more interesting than the others around it. A second before, it has not yet arrived. A second later, it is already gone. Henri Cartier-Bresson called it “a joint operation of the brain, the eye and the heart.”

Cartier-Bresson’s own approach, the famous “decisive moment,” which emphasizes elegant geometries and direct emotions, is not the only way to do street photography. Robert Frank’s shadowy anomie is influential, too, as is the surrealism of Diane Arbus. But to head out into a city with a camera is still fundamentally about collaborating with chance. A successful street photograph brings into the world not only something that wasn’t there before but something that could not have been anticipated.

The pleasure a photographer takes in each of these singular and unrepeatable occurrences must be why, at age 80, Lee Friedlander is still roaming New York’s streets in search of his next picture. One of his ongoing interests is our obsession with cellphones. On sunny days in Manhattan, Friedlander takes photos in the mad press of people, some of whom are talking on their phones, reading on their phones or typing into their phones.

Since the mid-1950s, Friedlander’s subjects have included all registers of the visual environment, encompassing individuals, crowds, buildings, vehicles and streetscapes, but also posters, signage, lettering, storefronts, chain-link fences and trees, all the fragments and detritus of the American cityscape, landscape and domestic interior. For most of his career, Friedlander, who shoots with a variety of cameras, has favored black-and-white film, which he meticulously develops and prints himself. With the cellphone project, the medium is the same. But this time, out there on the street, he’s just another American glued to his gadget, thrilled by the passing scene. Like his subjects, Friedlander is not distracted but rather is deeply absorbed in the task at hand. He is a part of the flow that he records.

What makes Friedlander’s photos distinct is the scrupulous inclusiveness. He shows us the tangles, the interruptions, the mess, the disorder — all of it. His photographs should fall apart, but they don’t: The catholicity of optical description, and his wide-angle lens, large depth of field and subtle middle tones, hold them together. Everything is seen with a kind of ecstatic candor. These recent cellphone photographs recruit sunshades, glasses, headphones, hairstyles, strides and advertising into dense assemblages, each of which packs in an impressive amount of New York attitude.

Streets with people on their phones feel even more congested than usual, and not only because of the increased number of awkward walkers. There are also those invisible participants in the street’s energy, the people on the other end of the line. There’s more here than meets either eye or ear. The cellphones in use imply other streets, or situations, elsewhere. Who knows how many languages this Babel of walking talkers might contain?

The Friedlander effect is properly encountered not in a single photo but in a group. You can feel it in the numerous books he has made on a wide range of themes: monuments, families, shop windows, trees, cars, marching bands, fashion models, television screens. Living for an hour or more inside his superb way of seeing is like taking a walk down a busy city street on a bright day: Your ordinary vision is transformed into something sharper, more uncanny, more intelligent and more generous.