-- Gertrude Stein¹

Factory Valleys by Lee Friedlander was first shown at the Akron Art Museum which, with the Central Bank of Akron, commissioned the NEA-funded project. Much of the criticism which followed either praised or castigated Friedlander for what he almost certainly did not do -- documentary photography. Some confusion arises, perhaps, because of the Akron Museum's reverent comparison of Friedlander with Margaret Bourke-White and Walker Evans, even though documentary hasn't ever been Friedlander's genre. Now that the ninety-seven print exhibition is at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, it might be useful to ascertain just what Friedlander did not do, in order to comprehend what he did.

During the winter of 1979-80, Friedlander made four treks into Ohio and Pennsylvania to photograph what was originally to be titled The American Ruhr. He produced roughly four kinds of rural and urban landscapes -- strip mines, houses and/or factories, downtowns and highways with billboards -- as well as portraits of workers. For the landscapes, Friedlander employed several visual devices which effectively thwart any close scrutiny of the mining operations, industrial sites or homes: large vacant foregrounds and screens of dead trees, as well as the usual girders, poles and wires. In Pittsburgh, for example, Friedlander photographed ravaged strip-mine sites with acres of emptiness or heaps of rocks and dirt in close, and toylike earth-moving machinery in the far distance. Or he filled two-thirds of the frame with a deeply tire-scarred mud field overlooking a just-visible factory complex. Overgrown freight yards with derelict freight card stretch for miles toward a fringe of high-tension pylons and smokestacks; Pittsburgh houses are half-hidden behind scrawls of barren tree branches or massive bridge girders or acres of dingy snow. In Cleveland, factories are tucked behind old makeshift corrugated iron fences and picturesque graveyards. These are scenic formulae, not places to live or work. Friedlander did not photographs factory gates, groceries, schools, churches (the bulbous Russian Orthodox spires are an exception), diners, bowling alleys, civic centers, libraries, movie houses, softball fields, bars and grills or shopping malls.

He did photograph streets with power poles, directional signs, curving intersections and festooned wires. He photographed highways with billboards; Sammy Davis Jr., in ski sweater and with a lunatic grin, hyping an antacid; Gordon's Gin (it's crystal clear); “Happiness is a New Car” (illustrated with a clip-art cartoon). Although the Midwest is synonymous with highways, Friedlander did not photograph much traffic. His roads are as empty as those in the science-fiction film in which an alien virus kills off the whole town overnight. Unlike the film, Friedlander provides no clues to explain the deserted streets; it's just the way he likes to see things. Equally unpopulated are the factory downtowns: Akron's deserted streets with a hanging sign reading “Z”; Pittsburgh's anachronistic wedding-cake building (city hall or insurance building? Friedlander doesn't tell . . . ); densely stacked office towers whose roof-top parking lot overlooks the legend STOCKS STOCKS STOCKS BONDS BONDS TAX-FREE. Where are the people? A pair of concrete lions guards the Lions Club minipark in Glassport, Pennsylvania; a gleaming bronze WWI soldier stands watch over his tiny manicured lawn in Johnstown. One pedestrian, dwarfed by signs for PENNA U.S. 22 and PENNA U.S. 30, jaywalks in McKeesport. Friedlander photographed both city and countryside as though no one at all lived there.

Friedlander's Factory Valleys portraits are the most important -- and most problematic -- element in the project. The workers are photographed in a straightforward style, using a single basic structure throughout. Each subject is posed at his or her machine, frozen at some point of an endlessly repeated gesture reminiscent of Frank Gilbreth's time and motion studies. Workers are not identified by name or job title; industries (except U.S. Steel and Hoover Vacuum) are generic -- a bakery, a machine shop, a wire manufacturer. We can only guess what the workers are producing. A burly riveter (?) in Cleveland chomps firmly on a cigar, his hands hidden; someone in a robotlike silvery suit plunges asbestos mittens into white heat; a tattooed sander in Akron finishes some unidentified surface; two workers in an impassive pas de deux wait with raised arms for their next component, their next motion cycle.

These portraits have been described as tender, as “warm and sympathetic pictures of people intensely serious about their work”² and as revealing the sociology of the workplace. There is nothing tender about these images of glum, weary men and women controlled by big, noisy, dirty machines. The are intensely serious, perhaps because a moment's inattention could mean the loss of an eye or a finger, or a job. All we might learn here about the sociology of these workplaces is that exhaustion, boredom and alienation come with the job. Friedlander's portraits sometimes recognize a person behind the work: a young black bakery worker who wears a computer-portrait T-shirt of herself and her man; a respirator-masked man sporting a Notre Dame jersey; a trim, well-coiffed blonde on a grimy stool, her cartoon-covered blouse narrating the lives she might have lived.

Most often Friedlander's subjects are appendages to the machinery, integral cogs in the assembly lines. No one smiles, no one makes eye contact with the photographer. He did not photograph these people dancing, making love or raising their kids. He did not photograph any of them in unemployment lines, welfare offices, or just hanging around -- as some of them must be, now that the factories are closed. Many of these workers will not work again, at least not here; their jobs have been permanently erased by automation, relocation and business failure.

Friedlander's is the kind of photography for which the world exists first and most importantly as raw material for visual arrangement, not as data. It is the kind of photography which shoots at the surfaces of the world, trusting that some depth of meaning will emerge. Criticisms which approach such photography as though it intends a conscious social purpose -- as documentary photography must -- miss the point. The distance which this kind of photography establishes between itself and the lives it photographs in Factory Valleys is much the same distance maintained by corporations and governments: the photographer uses the stuff for making “great photographs”; the corporation uses it for making profits.

Photography which asks no direct of embarrassing social questions has been ascendant in galleries and museums for decades. Ironically, it is this which makes Factory Valleys so powerful. Friedlander composes art out of plundered land, deteriorating towns and emptiness, and workers who are little more than automata. He offers no reasons, asks no questions, accepts the underlying structures without criticism and makes no alternative proposals. And yet, almost in spite of itself, the content of this work punches through its predictable formal constraints, and the hidden meaning emerges which should resolve any critical confusion. Factory Valleys is not documentary photograph; it is a stunning document of something gone very wrong in the industrial backbone of America.

Notes

¹ Epigraph in Factory Valleys: Ohio and Pennsylvania (New York; Callaway Editions IV, 1982).

² Vicki Goldberg, American Photographer (December 1982).