Like his photograph Mt. Rushmore, South Dakota, Friedlander’s Idaho, 1972 creates a landscape out of “obstacles,” his dedication to the theme much more apparent in this composition. The premise is simple: Friedlander has, from the cab of a truck, turned his camera outside and snapped a picture of a passing field. Or is it fields? Thanks to his skillful timing and focus the photographer has questioned the composition of the land by composing it instead as this photograph. We want to stand in the place of the photographer and tell ourselves that we are looking at a single scene divided by a mirror, but the different crops and sudden change in skyline on either side of the mirror seem to tell us otherwise, while the image in the mirror itself insists that we are seeing either what we have just passed—or perhaps another landscape completely. By forcing us to question whether or not we are looking at an image that we could see independently of the camera lens, Friedlander disrupts the construction of an otherwise straightforward landscape, allowing the viewer to confront the artifice of photographic sight.
– Jacob Edwards
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