valerian: Do you work on a series of pictures about a particular subject until... →
Do you work on a series of pictures about a particular subject until you exhaust it, or do you simply photograph and allow each body of work to emerge?
I just work and I throw the pictures in a box that says “X” or whatever, and eventually if the box gets full it merits looking at. I often work on two or three or four of those things at once. People tell me that they all look like they’ve been well thought out, and that’s because I’ve worked on them for so long.
Why do you work that way?
In a way it gets rid of infatuation- because I don’t think of it as anything except that I’m doing this little bit all the time. And I don’t even know what it’s going to be like until several years later, when I start to look at them. The nudes, for instance, took twelve years or so, and I didn’t really look at them closely during that time. They just went into boxes.
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Interview excerpt with Lee Friedlander
from Maria, an edition from the Smithsonian Series Photographers at Work
