Anthony Friedkin and his harvest of fine art photography

Cream of the Crop

In 2003, Anthony Friedkin revisited a body of work that spanned over 30 years, picked out 64 images, and published them as Timekeeper.

“The earliest photo goes back to 1967 or ’66,” he says, “and the latest photo was right on the cusp of 2003.”

Images from the book are on view through Feb. 23 at Gallery 478 in San Pedro, but this is the day to go and see them because the First Thursday Art Walk is taking place tonight between 6 and 9 p.m. and there are other galleries to step into as well and food trucks ready to take your order at this very moment.

Friedkin’s current show, however, is titled “Timekeeper + 9.” Why is that?

“The book came out in 2003,” Friedkin says; “we’re now in 2012. We’ve added nine years.” Translation: the artist hasn’t stopped shooting, and has slipped in a few works he’s created since Timekeeper was printed.

Telling a story

Anthony Friedkin is nationally recognized and, for starters, his photographs are in the permanent collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. Three of his images were on view at the Huntington Library in “This Side of Paradise” and currently he has two works in the “In Focus:Los Angeles” exhibition at the Getty Center. Although he has traveled the country and the world, he has maintained a modest residence on Twelfth Street in Santa Monica for nearly 40 years. It’s cramped and artfully disordered, and while everything breathes of creative mayhem there’s also a method to the madness.

If we want to take a few seconds and pigeonhole Friedkin, we might say he’s a photo-essayist in the sense of all the old Life Magazine photographers of the 1940s and ‘50s. The only one he mentions by name is W. Eugene Smith, but that’s enough to lead us to think of Margaret Bourke-White and Dorothea Lange and perhaps some of the photographers in the Getty’s recent “Engaged Observers” exhibition such as Mary Ellen Mark, Sebastião Salgado, James Nachtwey, and Leonard Freed.

In Friedkin’s case, he has published several photo essays, five major ones I believe, beginning with his documenting the gay communities of Los Angeles, West Hollywood, and San Francisco in 1969, ’70, and ’71. The others, in no particular order, explored New York City brothels, the ocean and surf,Beverly Hills, and Hollywood in its role as the maker of dreams. That’s admittedly pretty general, and maybe I can elaborate a little bit on one or two of them as I go along.

Timekeeper, the book, draws heavily from each of these series. Friedkin carefully selected what he considered the best or the most representative of what he’d shot. Since the images were being taken out of their original context, the sequencing of images was crucial.

“The criteria for the book was that every photograph was a singular work of art on its own, that if you were just anywhere and looked at the picture it would catch your attention – the way it was composed, the unusualness of it or the way the light was in it, or the way the people were relating to one another in it.”

Individually, then, each image met Friedkin’s initial criteria, but now they also had to sing in the same choir.

“When I started to do the editing I essentially picked certain themes,” which meant a sequence of six to ten images that shared an idea or feeling. “One passage would be about eroticism,” he says, “so I would deal with sexuality, both male and female. But whether it was a prostitute in New York City or one of my young surfer friends on the highway inMalibu, both of them had kind of an energy and an aura of sexuality and eroticism highly charged. So then I could put those images together because they kind of worked with one another even though they weren’t shot the same way.”

Back to each photograph as a work of art unto itself.

“It’s not a work of art because of the subject matter,” Friedkin says, “it’s a work of art because of the way it was seen and the moment that was captured, and how it was immortalized and hopefully how the story was revealed.

“Because in a sense,” he continues, “there is no moment; that moment is gone as soon as you think of it – it’s already gone. But in a photograph you can extend it, you can kind of preserve it. It’s a way of saying, ‘Oh, yes, moments are fleeting, but.’ With photography’s ability to capture time and place, you can seize upon a moment, capture it, and then later on investigate its revelations, artistically, spiritually, culturally, socially, every which way.”

“I love the idea of using the camera as a means of personal discovery.” – Anthony Friedkin

This probably applies to everything that Friedkin has shot, but there’s one specific body of work that many who reside in the Beach Cities can identify with. It’s a series, he says, “that is very dear to my heart that just deals with waves. I’m a life-long surfer and someone who loves the ocean because I grew up here in Southern California and I started going into the ocean as a child.”

Or, as he phrases it in Timekeeper: “When I’m in the water, I feel like I’m connecting to something so mighty and so primordial it’s beyond description. All the mysteries of life and death, light and darkness, space and time, are to be found there.”

“I look at the waves as liquid sculpture,” he adds, “moving with ethereal beauty as they move from the horizon line on the ocean up to the point where they crest and break on the shore and roll in. I’ve tried to artistically document their magnificence and their power and their beauty. The whole energy of the ocean in general is something I’m interested in as an artist to explore.”

Soul, spirit, integrity

Friedkin chose to open Timekeeper with an image of a man on a bridge.

“The photograph was taken on a very stormy morning, there’s hardly any color in the sky, and it was shot over a small river in Topanga Canyon. The person crossing the bridge has full raingear on, including a hat, all in black.

“I used the symbolism of the bridge as this journey, but then by placing the human figure in a position where you’re not sure if he’s coming towards you or going away from you it provokes the reader to start to understand that we’re going on this journey together. It’s gonna be personal, and it’s gonna be mysterious, and it’s gonna be different. It was very important to me that I use an image like that to introduce the whole book in general.”

The exhibition, however, has something the book does not:

“You get to see the original prints,” Friedkin says. “I’m a big believer in original art. You can look at the best reproductions in the most expensive art books in the world, but when you’re next to Van Gogh, next to ‘Starry Night’ and literally breathing near it, it’s not the same.

“I have a suspicion that works of art have a spirit and they have a soul, in the way we think of human beings having a spirit or a soul. Almost like it has an aura. You can feel it when you’re near it; you can actually feel the energy of it.”

Friedkin recounts how when he was in London many years ago, wandering through one of the museums, he turned a corner and abruptly came face to face with Botticelli’s masterpiece:

“And I’m like, Oh my God, this is ‘The Birth of Venus,’ the original! I was stunned; I’ll never forget it. And I believe that photographs are like that too, even [though] people always accuse them of being easy to reproduce and mechanical. They’re not. I don’t know why people think that, because anyone who’s ever been in the darkroom, who’s made an original print – No, you can never duplicate a print; you can get close, maybe, if you’re lucky.”

I think he’s right. People tend to believe that all photographs are duplicates from the word go, and thus none of them have any transcendental significance.

“Which is not really the case when it comes to a print that was actually handmade by the artist himself,” Friedkin says. “And there’s a big different in when the print was made, if it’s vintage or not vintage, if it was made around the time the negative was created; or was it made much later? Did the artist himself or herself make it, or was it printed by somebody else? All these things become critically important to collectors and also to the museums.”

The art and craft of film has changed drastically. Not so many years back, who’d ever have imagined Eastman Kodak closing its doors? On the other hand, only the Jetsons might have imagined we’d be using portable phones to take pictures that could be instantly disseminated anywhere in the world. And film itself? The verb remains, but the noun is vanishing. For Friedkin, though, everything is still very much hands-on.

“To me, grain (the grainy texture of a print) is like a metaphor for life itself. And I still shoot film. I mean, I do digital work also, but as an artist I still love film, I still love the grain of film, the aesthetics of film, especially in black and white.” And something else, the luminosity of the silver-tone print: “Almost 99 percent of all my work is done in silver gelatin.”

And then there’s the near-sacred task of bringing the image to life.

“When the artist gets a chance to interpret their own material,” Friedkin says, “I think it’s an extra benefit for the audience. I’m proud of my printing because I’ve been doing it since I was a kid in the darkroom, but I also think it gives me the opportunity to bring to life what the negative’s moral is. Like, what’s the moral to the story of this negative? Because this negative’s not like another negative. It’s not like any other negative that I have. It may be a photograph of a wave, it might be a shot of a doorway, it might be a nude, it could be a dead pelican. But I need to understand what it is about that negative that really, really needs to be understood and brought out and shown properly.

“So then how you print it,” he continues, “how you interpret it, how dark it is, how light it is, how much contrast there is, all those things become actually very, very significant to the overall statement. And I’m very proud of the prints that are in the show ‘Timekeeper’ because those were the original prints, many of them, that actually were used for the book. So they’re the best I can make. They’re beautiful prints!”

Now let’s go see if it isn’t true.

Timekeeper + 9, an exhibition of photographs by Anthony Friedkin, curated by Ray and Arnée Carofano, is on view through Feb. 23 at Gallery 478 (478 W. Seventh St.) in San Pedro. Open tonight, with the artist present, from 6 to 9 p.m. Hours, Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and by appointment. (310) 732-2150.