Friedlander's "America by Car' at the Whitney in N.Y.

Some years ago, Lee Friedlander began to tour America by rented car and take photographs from behind the wheel or out the window. The car itself would then become part of the resulting composition.

Photographing not only the results of the journey but at the same time representing the journey as such was an inspired idea. Ever since Plymouth Rock, America has defined itself as a passage and a quest. The Puritans clearing the New England wilderness were both literally forging a pathway— a clearance for settlement and worship— and seeking the divine encounter promised by the New World.

The later settlers who cleared the continent (removing or annihilating most of its native population in the process) were engaged in a more restrictedly practical business, but one not without religious connotation as well. The ever-retreating frontier exerted the magnetic pull of a spiritual quest, and the closing of that frontier with the completion of coast-to-coast settlement in the 19th Century was a trauma for the republic, as the historian Frederick Jackson Turner noted more than a century ago.

Kerouac's search

From that point— circa 1890, in Turner's telling— America was no longer a destination but a journey, endlessly redoubled on itself. The road novels of Jack Kerouac exemplified this notion, with its cast of hipsters perpetually seeking the fix at the end of the night. So did the lasting image of the Gold Rush, with its implicit promise of salvation waiting, if not on Earth then within it, if only one could find the sweet spot and dig deep enough.

See Nabokov's road novel Lolita for a jaded European take on the same theme, with Humbert Humbert crisscrossing the country in search of the particular sweet spot represented by Charlotte Haze's daughter. Not much about America got past Vladimir.

With Kerouac, the pioneer voyages of the earlier settlers, usurped by continental rail and air traffic, were restored in the automobile. I don't think it was wholly an accident of commerce that the U.S. invested so massively in the interstate highway system in the 1950s, when Kerouac was celebrating the romance of the road. The car is so intimately associated with personal freedom in the American imagination because it promised near-total access to America for the individual pilgrim and his brood.

It was such an enticing (and profitable) idea that California decided to dispense almost wholly with public transport. No one anticipated rush hour on the Los Angeles freeway.

Eye of the car

Photographing America by car is, of course, nothing new. Framing it that way is the special touch. We see, as it were, with the eye of the car itself, and what it lets us see is partial, fractured, not really an out-there but an in-with. This is, perhaps, a metaphor for consciousness itself, except that it is a mechanical consciousness: the observer trapped in his machine.

Or so, at least, it appears to the viewer, if you assume that the camera should be recording what's beyond the bubble of glass and the raised steering wheel, the dashboard or sideboard panels. These don't merely obstruct the external view; they also absorb it and usurp it, so that the car itself becomes the ultimate subject matter beyond a flickering parade of images, none of them truly stable or substantial.

But the car itself, in Friedlander's vision, is a metaphor too. It refers in turn to the camera's own eye, as if Friedlander had pulled us behind the lens and made us see the process of seeing— the way in which consciousness structures perception and constructs reality. America is not so much outside as in, and what is seemingly beyond is as much fantasy and hallucination as anything else.

Cartoony figures

In Friedlander's series— 192 black-and-white, close-hung photographs in all— what we "see" seems projected. Perhaps that's why so much of it is whimsical or bizarre: big cartoony images and animal sculptures along the road announcing this attraction or another (a bar, a diner, a store), the figures upstaging the paltry satisfactions they deliver.

Or we are treated to a running script of roadside signs, as in a Kafkaesque comic strip: "I Will Ransom Thee from the Power of the Grave," as one reads, only to be followed by "Exit Only" and "Keep Out."

We see, to be sure, occasional snatches of natural landscape, and a few people who pass by, like cattle loose on a pasture, sometimes unaware of being observed and sometimes approaching Friedlander's car with the uncertainly friendly, quizzical masks that Americans put on for strangers.

Everything is fragmentary, but certain themes and image-clusters recur, like the thread of sense in a dream that never delivers meaning. "We Support Our Troops," we read on one sign, and then "Hot Babes," and then "God Bless America." But in a country with bison on one hand and forklifts on the other (two other images in Friedlander's set), whoever said that America was supposed to make sense?

Humor in a junkyard

Of course, the series contains self-referential images of our car culture too: a big STOP sign that blocks the road— multiple signifiers, there— or a car junkyard on the prairie that reflects Friedlander's quixotic journey back on itself. All of this seems observed with the deadpan humor of the tourist— Friedlander gets out of the car at one point to photograph himself, with a big, stagey grin— but behind it is the fierce intelligence of a major artist.

There's as much attention, too, to the car details in each shot as to the external view, so that the frame of each picture possesses its own symmetry and dynamism. The result is a suite of much formal beauty.

In "America by Car," Lee Friedlander does what every great photographer does, which is to see what anyone else can see, but more deeply and complexly. You can take these pictures as a sendup of America or a rueful love letter to it; as a meditation on the mechanics (and the metaphysics) of photography itself; as a wry comment on what we call for better or mostly worse our postmodern moment.

Our photography, like our literature and art, has passed through its heroic phase: We won't have an Ansel Adams again, just as we won't have a Hemingway or a Pollock. But every artist has his obligation to the truth, and there are still pleasures to be had in telling it. Lee Friedlander tells us where we are now, and some of how we got there. There's no small accomplishment in that.♦


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