Anthony Friedkin and his harvest of fine art photography
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.”
Holwick Studio, Venice, Ca. PHOTO BY ANTHONY FRIEDKIN
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.