This image is from a series of photographs entitled ‘America by Car’ taken between 1995 and 2009 by American photographer and artist Lee Friedlander. Lee Friedlander, born July 14th 1934, helped evolve visual language of urban “social landscape” photographing subjects such as posters, street signs and reflections in shop fronts. In the 60’s and 70’s he primarily worked with black and white prints using 35mm cameras, however in recent years he began working with medium format cameras. Friedlander, whilst housebound due to arthritis, focused upon photographing his surroundings, capturing his own home and therefore the ‘sense’ of the place in which he lives, making him a perfect photographer from which to take influence from for my theme; especially looking into how people settle into a sense.
This particular image provides us with an outlook from a car’s driving seat out onto an imitation landscape of skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty in Las Vegas, providing the exciting sense of New York into a much smaller form. In contrast, Friedlander uses reflection within the wind mirror to show an average, ‘placeless’ bridge – something that has no particular ‘sense’ or meaning to most people. This, in my opinion, represents multiple sides to America – specifically Las Vegas. The dull, black interior of the car - emphasised by the use of black and white - contrasts against the whiter, much brighter false landscape and highlights the difference between the two places. Looking out through the interior also infers we are looking through the driver’s viewpoint, and almost makes the viewer feel as though they are the driver themselves. In addition to this, the upwards interior almost acts like a screen, partitioning off the average road scene from the false city. I believe this gives the image several dimensions and shows us the many ‘senses’ one place can have.
The use of such bright white colours for the New York scene connote hope, peace and purity, perhaps emphasised through contrast by Friedlander to highlight the humour of such a false and constructed place aiming to provoke these feelings and emotions from people. Through using the wind mirror for reflection, I believe this is again to highlight the humour of people having high expectations of places senses by showing that they can be right be mundane and everyday life things such as bridges – which in my opinion is considered to have ‘placelessness’. Again, of course, this could just be used to highlight the difference between a place with many senses and one which is ‘placeless’.
The lines in the road provide leading lines towards the false landscape and also give the image an element of movement; connoting these moments and these views are fleeting, much like a car journey itself, or in fact life.
In my opinion this is a very successful image as it evokes thoughts about whether fake or replicated things can give a person the same sense of place as the original through use of the misleading ‘New York’ landscape or whether it is too hard to imagine the validity of the place when you already know it is replicated. Because the image is taken from a car, and this is easy to see in the image, it feels like a truthful view point and therefore makes me feel like the connotations and senses it gives off is real; scenes of falseness and boredom, yet also senses of excitement and hope.
