I live in a desert and have seen plenty of it. There are different kinds of desert. There is the kind with soft rolling hills of orange sand, like ice cream or yogurt. Not much grows in these deserts. Then there are the rough and crumbly deserts, hills of cracked rock, valleys of soft-edged stone worn by years of occasional rain. Stuff grows here, like acacia trees and thorny bushes.
In the Sonora desert of the western United States, you get all kind of odd shaped cacti, of which Lee Friedlander took many photos in the 1990s. He’s known more for what might be called his street photography, but late in life he got into landscape and spent some time exploring the desert.
Reproduced here in a large format book, about the dimensions of a vinyl record sleeve, are 94 black and white images of the desert, largely cacti and other bushes. The camera was placed very near plants and so what you see are branches going off in every direction. The visual point here seems to be abstraction which is found in the abundance of detail and the lack of any center to the image. Many of them appear to be like Jackson Pollock paintings with which it’s easy to lose interest after half a dozen or more. The most powerful images in the set come at the end and work so well because they are off-type. Where for 80+ images the eye could find no center on which to rest, suddenly there are a handful of images with a single plant that pulls the eye into their centers. The final image features Friedlander himself, an old trope like a Stan Lee cameo in a Marvel film. While intellectually interesting and worth a look in the context of Friedlander’s career, this is a not a book I plan to revisit.
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