Roses in Vase, 1974

This image belongs to Friedlander's celebrated series and portfolio titled Photographs of Flowers, created in the mid-1970s.

Having established his reputation in the 1960s with jarring, complex urban streetscapes (notably in MoMA's 1967 New Documents exhibition), Friedlander turned his lens in the early 1970s toward natural forms, foliage, and domestic flora. Unlike classical floral photography (such as Irving Penn's idealized blooms or Edward Weston's sculptural botanical studies), Friedlander approached flowers with his signature dry humor, spatial tension, and formal complexity. In Roses in Vase, he captures the stems, water distortion, background clutter, and harsh light with the same unvarnished realism he applied to city streets.

As in much of his work, Friedlander uses glass, water reflections, and dense shadows to fracture the picture plane, turning a humble tabletop vase into a complex geometric exercise. Shot on medium or 35mm black-and-white film and printed on gelatin silver paper, the image emphasizes high-contrast whites, deep shadows, and tactile textures in the petals and leaves.

This image visually anticipates the specific obsessions he would fully explore two decades later. In the 1990shile largely confined to his home due to severe knee pain and subsequent replacement surgeries, Friedlander committed entirely to photographing the fresh cut flowers his wife placed in glass vases around their house. True to his formalist approach, he became less interested in the flower blossoms and highly focused on the chaotic arrangements of the stems beneath the water line, capturing the optical distortions, dense shadows, and light refracting through the glass.

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