That admirable institution, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, under the strong-willed leadership of Phyllis Lambert, has taken up the task of recording the fate of several of Frederick Law Olmsted’s landscape creations in North America.1 The CCA hired three of our leading landscape photographers—Robert Burley, Lee Friedlander, and Geoffrey James—to assess the status of Olmsted’s works. What has emerged are an exhibition and a book that tell us a great deal more about the photographers’ concerns than about Olmsted’s.
The handsomely printed catalogue to the exhibition provides us with plenty of information about the photographers, their works, and their approaches. The book includes a superb, if too-brief, essay by John Szarkowski on “The Photographer in the Garden.” Szarkowski is scarcely capable of writing an essay that is not fecund and felicitous. Other essays are by Ms. Lambert and by Paolo Costantini, Curator of the Photographs Collection of the CCA. There are, in addition, interviews, conducted by David Harris of the CCA, with each of the three photographers. The exhibition, which originated at the CCA in Montreal, appeared in a slightly abridged version in the galleries of the Equitable Center in Manhattan.
Mr. Szarkowski’s expert ministrations notwithstanding, I have never quite been able to think of Lee Friedlander as a major artist. Were he a painter, we would describe his techniques with such terms as “big brush” and “heavy loading.” Rembrandt could match such techniques to a deep underlying solidity of form, and used a
