1977 | Nevada Side — West Abutment
We were all looking at Lee Friedlander in the early ‘70s. I remember gallerists Jack Glenn and Larry Urrutia hung some of my pictures ($75) near Lee’s ($175), sometime around 1976. On another wall, Berenice Abbott had a fine print ($400 bargain) — her 1932 high view of nighttime Manhattan as a mysterious, luminous, brooding factory. Those were the days!
Geometry had always been a big deal for me, especially within the assertive engineer’s rectangle of the 35mm format, along with the venerable and companionable 6x9cm rollfilm format. Flexible grids came naturally (not via the worn Rule of Thirds or Golden Means), even in open space.
As I look at this picture again for the first time in forty years, I realize this was not a result of imposing my own structure on the world, but of my ready eye noting what was already there.
▷ At the Leitz factory beginning in 1913, Oskar Barnack developed prototypes for what was released as the Leica in 1925. To use readily-available sprocketed motion-picture film, he worked out an image size of two horizontally-joined 18x24mm movie frames (the “Academy” format — a satisfying 4:3 aspect) and gave us the 24x36mm (3:2 aspect) which many of us have come to call our own.
▷▷ I’m giving you the format dimensions here in height x width, but aspect ratios are generally noted as width : height.