On Saul Leiter, the American road photographers, and the second frame that does not roll down.
Last issue's editorial closed with an imperative: make the honest one. Stand close. Use the available light. Say yes. I meant every word and I still mean it. But there is something the imperative did not say, and it is what this issue is about. There is no honest photograph made without glass. The window is in the picture. The mirror is in the picture. The windshield is in the picture even when you crop it out. The photograph that pretends otherwise is doing the thing the model does — offering you a surface as if it were a transparent record of what was there. It is not. It is a frame, made by someone, looking through another frame, made by something. To say yes through that is harder than #08 made it sound. The yes is real. The glass is part of the yes.
The American road photographers solved one of the two frames by being honest about it. Robert Frank made The Americans on a 10,000-mile road trip in 1955–56, much of it through the windshield of a 1950 Ford Business Coupe. The book had to be published in Paris first, in 1958, because no American press would touch it; the country it described did not yet recognise itself. What you see in those eighty-three photographs, again and again, is the apparatus of the seeing — a car door bisecting the lower third of the frame, the dashboard taking the foreground, a side mirror holding the road behind. He did not crop the apparatus out. He could not crop it out. The car was the way he was here. He was a twenty-something Swiss Jewish émigré photographing postwar America from the only vantage available to him, which was the front seat. The visible frame was the visible half of his vantage.
Lee Friedlander, half a century later, made the move explicit. America by Car (Yale, 2010) is a book of two hundred photographs in which the literal frame of every single image is the inside of a rental car. Friedlander was sixty when he started the project and seventy-six when he finished. The windshield is always there — sometimes a small slice, sometimes filling half the frame — along with side mirrors, rearview mirrors, dashboard reflections, the chrome of a passenger-side door. America by Car is not pretending to be a window onto America. It is admitting the car. It is admitting that the eye recording America was sitting in a Hertz outside a strip mall in Lubbock, in Pensacola, in Vegas. The honesty is the apparatus, and the apparatus is in every photograph because Friedlander finally said: of course it is.
The car was the way he was here. The visible frame was the visible half of his vantage.
— Viewfinder
Stephen Shore took the apparatus inside, into the motel room. Uncommon Places (1973–82) is the book that taught American colour photography to look at the ordinary and the saturated together. Shore worked from an 8x10 view camera on a tripod, but the structural figure of the book is repeated reflective surfaces: a bathroom mirror containing a Holiday Inn room, a TV screen showing a baseball game while reflecting the curtain behind the camera, a windshield with a road map open across it in a parking lot. He photographed the second frame as carefully as the first. The interior of the seeing — the room he was actually staying in, the meal he was actually eating, the way the light fell on the wall behind him — was always part of the document.
Alec Soth keeps returning to glass because he keeps returning to thresholds. Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004) and Songbook (2014) are books about being a photographer who is somewhere he has to drive to be. The bedroom window of a stranger seen from the lawn. The bathroom door of a motel pushed half open. The diner seen through a fogged café front. Soth is the most careful contemporary heir to Frank's lineage and he is also the inheritor of what Frank did not entirely resolve. Sleeping by the Mississippi is nominally about the river. It is actually about the position of the photographer along it, which is always one frame back from the subject — the threshold space of someone who is going to drive away tomorrow.
While Frank was driving, while Shore was renting Cadillacs, Saul Leiter was walking ten blocks of the East Village. He did not move to find a frame; he waited for one to find him. He had been a painter first — Pittsburgh-born, sent to study to be a rabbi, bolted to New York in 1946 at twenty-two to paint, fell in with the Abstract Expressionists, picked up a 35mm Leica in 1948 because Eugene Smith handed him one. He shot through panes for the next sixty years. Fogged café windows. Snowfall against glass. Awnings cutting across the upper third of the frame. The slot in a construction-site board. Through Boards (1957), the canonical Leiter image, is a city scene reduced to the single lit gap the boards allow; the rest of the frame is just the boards. He ignored most of what was in front of him. The composition started with the rectangle, and the subject was whatever fragment fit inside. Snow (1960). Reflection (1958). Taxi (1957). Foot on El (1954). Eight thousand colour slides in a shoebox. He kept them mostly to himself for forty years. Steidl's Early Color did not arrive until he was eighty-three.
The Bologna retrospective at Palazzo Pallavicini, currently open and running through July, takes its title from his most quoted line: A window dotted with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person. The line is the title of the exhibition because it is also the programme of the work. The window is the picture. What is behind it is incidental.
The shape of these arguments is the same. Frank, Friedlander, Shore, Soth, and a stationary New Yorker who never owned a car. Two American methods and one painter's. The road photographers put the apparatus of their movement in the frame. Leiter put the apparatus of his stillness in the frame. The resulting photographs do not look alike — Frank's are kinetic and grainy, Leiter's are layered and quiet, the colour underexposed for the midtones — but they are arguing the same thing by opposite methods. Both refused the pretence of the transparent window. Both admitted the glass.
Now the harder argument, which is the one the literal frame does not quite reach. There is a second frame in every photograph that the visible window does not name. It is the one the photographer brought. Frank's outsider eye is not an opinion he had about America; it is the angle of his looking, the thing that made the windshield matter in the first place. A fifth-generation Iowan with a Mamiya at the same intersection would not have made the same picture, regardless of glass. Shore's Uncommon Places is the result of an explicit decision to reset the mental frame — he had been a MoMA young-genius at twenty-three, working with Warhol at the Factory at sixteen, with a solo show at the Met at twenty-four, and he chose, deliberately, to go and look at a Holiday Inn room in Las Vegas with the same care the prior generation had brought to Provence. Soth's mental frame is set to the world is melancholy. It is. His pictures confirm it because his eye was already there. Leiter said, plainly, that he was not interested in interesting things. That is a sentence about a mental frame, named in public: I have decided in advance which kind of attention I am bringing, and the rest will be ignored.
Here is the part of the essay where I will not let either frame off the hook. The literal frame is the easier honesty. It is visible. The reader can see the windshield in the picture and recognise the position from which the picture was made. The mental frame is invisible, and the photograph that pretends to have no mental frame is the most dishonest one available. The flat-lay of the perfect coffee cup. The pin-sharp landscape with the over-cooked sky. The street portrait shot with a 35mm lens at ten feet because a YouTuber called that the geometry of objectivity. None of these are unframed. They are all framed. They have all decided in advance what the picture will be, and the technical neutrality of the framing — its commitment to uncluttered, well-lit, unaffected reproduction — is the most heavily mannered choice currently on offer. The model does this for free. It is, in fact, the only kind of picture the model knows how to make: a generation from the consensus mental frame, with every visible apparatus polished out. That is its entire game.
Which is why the literal frame is a gift to the honest photographer. The visible window — the windshield, the doorway, the awning, the breath on the glass — is a confession that there is a position from which the picture is being made. It says, in form: I am here. I am behind something. I cannot pretend I am not. Frank's car is in his picture because the car is how he was looking. Leiter's window is in his picture because the window is how he was looking. The visible frame is the photograph admitting its own setup. And once a photograph has admitted glass, it is most of the way to admitting attention. The mental frame stops hiding when the literal one stops hiding first.
The mental frame stops hiding when the literal one stops hiding first.
— Viewfinder
The thing the road photographers and Saul Leiter agreed on, by their opposite methods, was that an honest picture is one that admits its frames. Both of them. The car you cannot roll the window down on, and the eye you cannot leave at home. The Americans opens with a flag-draped storefront in Hoboken seen through a window. Uncommon Places is built around mirrors. America by Car is the inside of two hundred rental cars. A Window Dotted with Raindrops is its own thesis made in a single phrase: the picture is the rain on the glass, and the photograph is also the man who chose to look at it. Issue #05 said the photographers who stopped were honest. Issue #06 said what vanishes is the camera's deepest subject. Issue #07 said absence is evidence. Issue #08 said yes is harder than no. This issue says: some yeses are made through glass, and the glass — both kinds — is part of the yes. The literal one is the easy admission. The harder admission is that the seeing arrived already framed.
What you brought to the picture is in the picture. There is no clean window. There never was.
