Essay | Photographs

The Photographs of Malcolm Lubliner
Dr. Robert S. Mattison

Two great themes in American art are landscape and social commentary. In 20th century photography, the landscape tradition is represented by the work of such figures as Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock, Harry Callahan, and Edward Weston. Their photographs were a culminating point for the 19th century Hudson River School paintings and westward-movement photographs where imagining an unmarred landscape in all of its grandeur signified America’s cultural heritage. Representations of American society are found in the photographs of Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lewis Hine, and Dorothea Lang among many others. Their images captured segments of the varied American social experience. In the hands of such photographers, both nature and culture were seen as communal experiences and as a common reserve for our nation. Our more skeptical and self-critical late-modern age has modified these views. Malcolm Lubliner’s photography captures a late-modern sensibility. His photographs of suburban landscapes show that humankind everywhere impinges on nature. For Lubliner, the imposition of sign systems and barriers upon the natural world is one of the marks of our age. Yet the humans who made these objects seldom appear, and Lubliner’s photographs have no pretense of defining a social system. Lubliner’s photographs never treat their subjects with nostalgia but instead employ gentle irony and self-aware skepticism. But Lubliner does not only wryly comment on displacements in the world around us, he finds both lyricism and pathos in the ordinary. His photographs compel us to look again at those everyday corners of the world that had escaped our attention. The photographs urge us toward new visual discoveries in seemingly mundane settings.

Lubliner, who has exhibited his photographs widely in the United States as well as in Berlin and London, has for three decades pursued ideas that may be connected to his recent landscape photographs. During the 1970s his subject was the automobile in an urban setting. He showed cars as alien creatures that never quite seemed to belong in their environments. In Lubliner’s words the cars were "mobile street furniture that abruptly and oddly altered the visual comfort of a place, an irritant living just below consciousness…" During the 1980s Lubliner created a series of photographic still life tableaus using objects that traditionally did not appear in still life—broken glass, torn and folded paper, dead fish, toys and light bulbs. On one hand, Lubliner regards these works as a comment on democracy; even the most unlikely and "inappropriate" objects were welcome subjects. On the other hand, the objects appear displaced, an effect that is increased by the fact that these works were printed on frosted acetate with silver emulsion on both sides and backed by chrome Mylar. The effect is to give the works a glowing weightless character. Their almost surrealist aura resembles that of Man Ray’s Rayograms of the 1920s. The references to democracy and displacement in these works, as well as their silvery tone, presage Lubliner’s urban landscape photographs that were begun in the 1990s.

Early in his career, Lubliner was influenced by the aesthetics and humanity of John Cage and Merce Cunningham. The attention that Cage and Cunningham paid to ordinary sounds and movements parallels the attention paid to despoiled landscapes in Lubliner’s photographs. The Buddhist-like fascination Cage and Cunningham held for ordinary events has important implications for Lubliner’s work. Lubliner also had an early interest in the art of Jasper Johns whom he met while Johns was at Gemini, GEL print atelier in Los Angeles. (Between 1968 and 1978 at the height of one of the most fertile periods in American art, Lubliner was Gemini’s contract photographer and had the opportunity to work with many of the artists who made prints there.) Johns’s intense focus on mundane objects highlighted in the artist’s words "What is seen but not known." In John’s prints, the subtle tonal range that encourages us to make very fine visual distinctions may be found in the extended gray scale of Lubliner’s photographs.

Lubliner’s interests are shared by a number of other photographers concerned with the landscapes of contemporary industrial culture. These include Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke, Roger Mertin and Stephen Shore. These photographers depict tract houses, factory buildings, western land development, and urban streets. Like Lubliner, they depict defaced landscapes. At first, it might seem that these photographers provide information without personal content, using the camera solely as a descriptive tool. In fact, all of these photographers face decisions concerning subject matter and formal organization. Their topographical images are often highly structured, suggesting that the very absence of overt emotions and specific events in their photographs constitutes a philosophical and artistic commentary on the normal and invisible look of the urban environment.

Lubliner’s photographs highlight the issue of seemingly ordinary and often marred landscape images that actually constitute careful artistic choices. In Keep Right (2000) we are presented with a vast horizontal panorama featuring a dramatically changing sky, a potentially sublime view of nature. The circular driveway in the foreground, accompanied by prominent sign directing the passerby to "drive right," is, at first, an ironic intrusion on the landscape, one that communicates mankind’s obsession with controlling traffic flow even in a location where it has no meaning. On second thought, the sign defines the center and the scale of the composition, and the concrete walkway establishes its foreground plane. The photograph Forestville End also features a sign. At the termination of a path in the woods that is dramatically interlaced by tree shadows, the sign simply reads "end." Humorously, it tells us what we already know, and on one level is Lubliner’s wry comment on semiotics, his own version of sign systems. Yet, that sign too focuses the composition. Oddly, it seems just in the right place, and subsequently it becomes hard to imagine the photograph without it.

Moselle Mirror is one of the wittiest of Lubliner’s works containing signs. In this photograph, the "sign" is actually a mirror placed on a pole against a concrete wall. While the actual purpose of the mirror is to allow motorists to see around a blind corner, the effect in the photograph is to open up a visual window against the blank wall. The effect is simultaneously magical and mundane. We are reminded of the Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte and his painted contradictions between various illusions that lead us to question the nature of reality. If art, as is often said, is the mirror of reality then Lubliner’s photograph is a mirror of a mirror. Randsburg (1982) features two old derelict men in conversation combined with another of the photographer’s clever signs. One of the men, with a mildly insulting gesture, holds up his pinky finger while the other, insecure, leans against a metal advertising logo containing the word "joint." One thinks of a joint in the finger. Perhaps this is the joke as the two men join(ed) together in a manner that the viewer will never entirely understand. As in other Lubliner photographs, chance relationships give the image a quirky significance that is hard to define.

Seemingly humble manmade objects in many of Lubliner’s photographs have a strangely monumental quality. Similarly, Lubliner’s penchant for shooting his photographs toward the sun results in an extended tonal scale that directs the photographs towards the timeless rather than the momentary. In Skypipe (1987), for instance, Lubliner simply photographed a tall ventilation pipe by the side of the highway. But the low camera angle highlighting the pipe’s hooked form against the sky, as well as its foreground position and centrality, lend it a grandeur that we might otherwise associate with a Brancusi sculpture. In Crosshatch (1985) the sky is marked by the intersecting pattern of two jet contrails. Power wires diagonally cross the two vapor paths, and a tiny portion of a triangular roof peak appears at the lower edge of the photograph. One thinks of the contrast between this work and Alfred Stieglitz’s arch-romantic Equivalents. For Lubliner, even the sky is marked by human presence. But at the same time Crosshatch calls to mind such refined abstract paintings as those by Robert Ryman. The sense of design in this photograph is unerring.

So Malcolm Lubliner’s recent photographs take us in two directions. On one hand, they remind us with subtle irony of the human intrusion in the natural world. Everywhere, signs and barriers surround us. On the other, they suggest that such intrusions give the landscape significance. Lubliner’s decisions concerning selection of motif, management of light, and organization of form are all directed toward discovering a subtle poetry in such despoiled landscapes.

Dr. Robert S. Mattison
The Marshall R. Metzgar Professor of Art History
Lafayette College