Time Laps
Barry Frydlender
Andrea Meislin Gallery, 526 West 26th Street, #214 [btw. 10th & 11th Aves.], 212.627.2552.
http://www.andreameislin.com
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Barry Frydlender is making photographs that succeed on so many levels and with such stunning breadth that the viewer is left to wonder: Why hasn’t he hit really big yet?
Well first of all he’s not young. Ew. Second of all he’s from Israel and that’s so, you know, er, problematic. And third, his large photographs are unabashedly masterful in their technical accomplishments: marvels of time lapse digital overlay that blend to seamless wholes into which all time seems to collapse upon itself. Theses are not callow pics of 20somethings adrift in nature nor are they monothematic concept images trotted out ad infinitum. Frydlender loves and cares about his subjects, some more intimately than others, but always with the spirit of camaraderie that comes from living in a small nation which, for all its issues, still has the feel of a groovy summer camp about it.
What are we to make of that?
His method is not a gimmick. It is has become his way of seeing. He takes many, many exposures of a site--a beach, a swimming pool, a café, a subway car--from minutely different perspectives. He gathers these fragments to form a single image with nary a blur or stilted crop. In this way Frydlender is able to capture time and narrative in a single image, be they scenes of action or repose, epic tableaus or intimate portraits.
It is curious, or perhaps fitting, that Frydlender often chooses as his time lapse subjects those who seem to be going most slowly. Some of his subjects are even asleep a la Warhol. One of his photos, Take a Picture of Me, features a composite portrait of a woman on a beach taken over a year’s time. When you look at some of his images, you know something is up but not exactly what. Even where you see the hand of time at play as when a red headed woman appears here and there at once on a contested beachfront settlement, Shirat Hayam (“End of Occupation?” Series #2), something in the overall atmosphere of the place makes you experience her movement as if in real time.
Despite the anger and sense of violence that hovers in the air like dry heat, these images and the people in them exude a languor that definitively captures the laid back aura of the land even today. There would be more frenetic tension in a photo of the entrance to an average American mall than there is here in the face-off between settlers and the army whose job it was to remove them.
On the wall opposite this photo, in Waiting, 38 Years (“End of Occupation?” Series #1), a line of Palestinian men and boys stand waiting and watching the scene that plays out in the photo across from them [this is actually as it occurred]. The Palestinians are waiting on a hilltop above the beach for the settlers below them to be dispersed. An older man among the teens and boys writes his path across the tableau, his steady patience that of the carrion bird waiting, knowing eventually his moment will come.
There are other gems in this relatively modest exhibit. In The Blessing a party of Hasidic men in a park on a beautiful day cast a simple but resonant color palette thanks to their uniform garb. The balance of colors are pitch perfect painterly.
Estates, however, is the best among bests. Read from the left, we first encounter a cemetery behind a pool which is in the back of a slightly faded luxury apartment building. The time lapse eye exposes itself to the ancient cemetery again and again waiting for something to move, the dead to rise, but here, alas, nothing does—not even a stray cat. In the large pool, 2 swimmers pass each other in opposite directions. Only it’s the same swimmer. Passing himself. Laps. Lapse.
There is no sweeter sadness than crossing paths with your younger self: a swimmer crossing in his own wake, a people returning to a land.
An instructional poster for swim safety hangs towards the back of the pool area. It is printed in imperfect international English and inadvertently points to the truth of the slow, inexorable downward pull of these lands, these scenes. It’s titled in red capital letters: DROWING. We are all drowing.
Life is short. Art is long. You never know.
artholes!
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