Although I studied with Minor White in an experimental graduate program in photography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and admired his iconic photographic abstractions, for most of my career my chief interest has been in portraiture as a personal documentary and street photographer.
I never felt personally connected to abstraction until ten years ago when, at a golf equipment trade show, I saw a bisected golf ball. For the first time, abstraction resonated with me as I discovered elegant formal qualities and surprising metaphorical possibilities in the unlikeliest of places, a 1.68” golf ball. Thirty-five years after first viewing the abstractions of photographers White and Aaron Siskind and the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler, I learned to appreciate and embrace abstraction in my own work. For some viewers, my photographs from this series, titled Interior Design, allude to celestial bodies and the sublime. For me, their serendipitous structural exquisiteness and their subtle and passionate arrays of colors are gifts.
Incidentally, I do not play golf.
James Friedman
http://www.jamesfriedmanphotographer.com/index.php?/projects/thumbnails/4
