SEEING DOUBLE: THE SUBJECT OF VISION IN LEE FRIEDLANDER’S SELF-PORTRAITURE

Abstract

American photographer Lee Friedlander’s photographs are often deemed to be unreadable. This critical assessment of his work is principally based on his manipulation of reflection, framing, and superimposition. This essay takes these manipulations as its subject. I suggest one method of reading the unreadable, focusing particularly on two self-portraits: Tallahassee, Florida 1969 and Madison, Wisconsin 1966. My approach weaves together the ideas of Jacques Lacan and Homi Bhabha. In the first section, I place Lacan’s concept of the stain into dialogue with the recurring appearance of Friedlander’s own shadow in his self-portraiture. In the second, I bring Bhabha into conversation with Lacan, showing crossovers in how they conceptualise reflections. I argue that Tallahassee and Madison visually articulate these crossovers. In the third, I use Bhabha’s concept of doubling to approach the two photographs’ delineation of the Lacanian gaze. In forging links between Friedlander, Lacan, and Bhabha, I propose two complementary ideas. The first is that Friedlander’s photographs help to illustrate commonality between Lacan’s and Bhabha’s work. The second is that Lacan and Bhabha help us read Friedlander’s often perplexing self-portraits. By expressing an absence of the self, these photographs comment on the impossibility of self-portraiture.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Mark Hewitson and Reinier van Straten for shaping my understanding of Homi Bhabha, to Jann Matlock for introducing me to Kaja Silverman’s work, and to Ashley West for initiating my fascination with Friedlander’s photographs all those years ago. I am indebted to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. I would also like to thank Rebecca Robertson at Fraenkel Gallery for speaking to Lee Friedlander on my behalf and for organising the reproduction rights for the two photographs which are central to this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For photographs, I follow the titles as they appear in Friedlander, Self Portrait. Differences in titling can be found in some gallery listings for the works, with the most common difference being a comma placed before the year. Given Friedlander’s involvement in putting together Self Portrait, I take the edition as the authority on this matter.

2. Angier, Train Your Gaze, 18.

3. Jeffrey, Photography: A Concise History, 216.

4. Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 349.

5. Wells et al., Photography: A Critical Introduction, 121.

6. I am applying Lacan’s work to a literal lens — Friedlander’s. Shepherdson, Vital Signs, 8 & 2.

7. Ibid., 2.

8. While I shall refer to it as Seminar XI throughout this essay, the title of the edition I cite is The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.

9. Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego,” 14 (my emphasis).

10. Easthope, “Homi Bhabha, Hybridity and Identity,” 147.

11. Netto, “Politics of Vision,” 84 & 70.

12. Vilaseca, “The Ambassadors goes to Manila,” 78; McInturff, “Dark Continents,” 9.

13. Cited in McInturff, “Dark Continents,” 11–12. McInturff is referring to Said, “Traveling Theory.”

14. Burgin, “Looking at Photographs,” 150.

15. Ibid., 150.

16. Ibid., 146.

17. Ibid., 150.

18. Ibid., 152.

19. Wells et al., Photography, 121.

20. Szarkowski, “The Friedlander Self,” n.p. (The edition this essay is found within, Self Portrait, is not paginated.)

21. Friedlander, “Introduction,” n.p.

22. Ibid.

23. I say echo because although Seminar XI was first published in 1973 (three years after Friedlander’s introduction), the text is taken from a series of seminars which began nine years earlier. Lacan, Seminar XI, 97.

24. Ibid., 96.

25. Zizek, Looking Awry, 114.

26. I have deliberately avoided using Lacan’s term the gaze in this section. While Lacan’s understanding of the stain and Holbein’s skull is rooted in his theory of the gaze, in this section of my essay the gaze itself is not essential to the scope of my analysis. I explore the gaze in my later section “Splitting, doubling, and the gaze.” For Lacan’s passage on Holbein’s painting, see Lacan, Seminar XI, 88–89.

27. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 67.

28. Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, 1–2.

29. Ibid., 2.

30. Lacan, “Ego,” 14.

31. The photograph’s categorisation as a self-portrait of Friedlander obliterates the presence of the woman. She remains, at most, an anonymous interloper. The white man overshadows the black woman. There is fertile ground for an analysis of Madison, Wisconsin 1966 which explores the power relations that constitute race, especially given Bhabha derives his theory of the missing person from the relationship between coloniser and subaltern. Given my focus on how well Bhabha’s ideas travel, such an analysis is sadly outside the scope of this essay.

32. See note 3 above.

33. Street, “Power of the Self-Portrait,” 32.

34. Lacan, Seminar XI, 106.

35. Silverman, “Fassbinder and Lacan,” 293.

36. Silverman, Threshold of Visible World, 134.

37. Ibid., 131 & 135.

38. Ibid., 135. Although unfortunately beyond the remit of this essay, a question which arises from Silverman’s analysis is how people felt the gaze before the advent of cameras. What metaphor would those people have used to apprehend it?

39. Here Silverman quotes from Lacan’s Seminar XI. “Fassbinder and Lacan,” 277.

40. Silverman, Threshold of Visible World, 135 (my emphasis).

41. Ibid., 136 (my emphasis).

42. Saper makes a similar argument in relation to the gaze itself only ever being missing from an artwork, even if the artwork shows the gaze working. See “A Nervous Theory,” 33–52.

43. Silverman, Threshold of Visible World, 137. Silverman also attaches this assessment to Crary and Harun Farocki, with the latter’s film Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges forming the object of study in her Lacano-Crarian analysis.

44. Lacan, Seminar XI, 84.

45. Ibid., 103.

46. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 63–4.

47. Ibid., 64.

48. Ibid.

49. The splitting of the subject crops up in Lacan’s Seminar XI, but in a manner quite different to how Bhabha formulates it. Lacan speaks of a “splitting of the being […] between its being and its semblance, between itself and the paper tiger it shows to the other”. Seminar XI, 106–7. Although Lacan does not clearly define the middle structure in his diagrams (the image/screen), Silverman and others have read it as this “paper tiger” — in other words the “semblance” or image of ourselves that is seen.

50. There are suggestions of this modification elsewhere in Bhabha: he speaks of the subject being “seen, from where it is not,” a statement which strikes me as an apt description of the camera’s role in these photographs by Friedlander. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 47.

51. Silverman, Threshold of Visible World, 135.

52. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 110.

53. Ibid., 72.

54. Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, 38.

55. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 243.

56. Unwin, Complete Brecht Toolkit, 49.

57. See note 21 above.

58. Said, “Traveling Theory,” 242.

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Notes on contributors

Surya Bowyer

Surya Bowyer is a writer and researcher based in London. Between 2018 and 2019, he taught as an English lecteur at Sorbonne University’s Faculté des Lettres. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Oxford and a master’s degree in European Culture and Thought from University College London. His research interests include representations and how they work, the relationship between word and image, and the history of media.