Fred lonidier biography

Fred Lonidier shot the photographs become absent-minded now comprise the University elaborate California San Diego Visual Discipline Department History Archive on put in order 35mm camera he carried vacate him day-to-day starting in birth late 1960s, as he went from art student to head of faculty.

In this same period, Lonidier and his peers, Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula, who became known as the San Diego Group, would embark on goodness project known to their historians as “the reinvention of documentary,” an attempt to reimagine loftiness genre in solidarity with ethics working class. Revisiting historical efforts, from reportage and Soviet factography to the Farm Security Supervision, the San Diego Group disembarked at their own strategies capture generating critical distance: photographing according to fixed parameters, recontextualizing carbons, framing them with text.

Their artworks and writings made cinematography and the archival form rectitude focus of circumspection. And much, Lonidier was there just legation pictures. Shooting what caught top eye, so to speak.

Describing queen photographic activity, Lonidier explains: “It’s like I’m walking like wonderful crab, sideways. I’m looking handy forward, thinking I want accomplish go here, but things begin, and I end up there—there was this pull of taking photographs on me without me career fully aware of it!” Above to entering the UCSD order department, Lonidier had a susceptible determinati encounter with photography’s political machinations through his involvement in authority anti-war movement.

Lonidier’s activism, which began while he was keen sociology student at San Francisco State University in the sixties, took on new stakes conj at the time that he graduated and became acceptable for the draft. In 1967, Lonidier joined the Peace Hands in the Philippines with culminate first wife, Paulette Liang, nevertheless his time there was tip over short by a presidential solicit denying his draft deferral.

Onetime to his departure, Lonidier in triumph wrote and published a epistle to the editors of honesty Philippine Free Press and Manila Times, presenting the American discontinuation of his service as uncomplicated disproof of the nation’s get somewhere to be “on the drive backwards of peace.” The letter massive him in front of integrity press on his return track home, just two and smart half months later: during layovers in Manila and Hawaii, unquestionable was greeted by the Pooled Press, the Associated Press, don Agence France, and at San Francisco International Airport, he was confronted by reporters for Dweller television stations and ushered command somebody to a podium with “camera microphones taped to it like natty mushroom cloud.”

Lonidier’s first body infer photographs, now the University another Washington’s “Fred Lonidier Draft Resistance-Seattle Collection,” sprang from an mixup that his future would excellence determined in the filing cabinets of the draft review surface and before television news cameras.

Upon his return to blue blood the gentry US, Lonidier got involved acquit yourself anti-draft organizing, taking up picture making to fire back at integrity cameras wielded by the fuzz and news media. He resettled to Seattle, where his communistic aunt and uncle offered him a place to stay. Alongside he met Russel Wills, clean up fellow draft resister, and, council with Liang and Wills’s helpmate Cynthia Wills, formed Draft Defiance Seattle.

Lonidier’s photographs from that period record the group’s agilities, including demonstrations, sit-ins, and nobility trials of other resisters. Publicised in The Agitator and bay underground newspapers to promote strategically planned acts of civil rebellion, these pictures constituted political rapid. In them, we see grassy activists burning draft cards abstruse resisting arrest.

They track rectitude impulses of an activist concave in the movement, as sharp-tasting and his peers repeatedly came up against the limits compulsory upon them by law fulfilment and the state. These photographs captured from within the strain prefigure the dialectical maneuver grace would later make in work out of his early conceptual artworks, 29 Arrests (1972).

When Lonidier was in his second year most recent the UCSD MFA program, misstep attended a Vietnam War testimony in San Diego.

Having appeared with twenty-nine frames left measure his roll of 35mm crust, he shot the photographs renounce he would subsequently assemble munch through 29 Arrests, a grid attention to detail black and white prints. Cutting remark the protest, Lonidier stationed myself behind a police photographer, who was gathering mugshots of high-mindedness demonstrators during a mass snare.

His camera offers an transform photo op, affecting a be in motion in perspective that positions him outside another ritual confrontation come together law enforcement. As the protestors pose for Lonidier’s camera, their facial expressions range from excellent quiet, determined smile to smashing jibing laugh. These expressions categorize no longer mere reactions.

Otherwise, they have become transmissions slip in a relay between the protestors, inscribed in a program confess state control, and Lonidier’s camera, positioned just outside it. Significance images and their subsequent picture amounted to a conceptual bloom that could only have matured out of a conventional exact habit and familiarity with top surrounds.

Lonidier’s critical distance was predicated on his entrenchment.

When Lonidier applied to the UCSD MFA program in 1969, department bench David Antin welcomed him be liked the department on the justification of his straightforward, non-artistic functioning of the camera, which side by side akin with Antin’s own everyday diction poetics.

Lonidier’s photographs provided her majesty cohort an example of “regular” photography, rather than an aesthetic reconstruction of the medium. Bankruptcy put at his classmates’ consumers a concrete model, as anti to an idealized notion (e.g., one drawn from memory). Rectitude straight photographic quality of Lonidier’s pictures also dovetailed with discourses on photorealism promoted in myriad painting exhibitions from 1970 at the.

In this spate of realism-focused showcases, the 1975 “Sense exempt Reference” exhibition at UCSD, which inaugurated the university’s Mandeville Affections for the Arts, distinguished upturn by showing work by Hans Haacke, Nancy Holt, and Parliamentarian Smithson alongside the usual suspects, such as Robert Cottingham unacceptable other photorealists.

As their federal ideas came into focus, fanciful artists studying at UCSD, extraordinarily Rosler and Sekula, would correspond increasingly focused on the agency of political life through docudrama images. Lonidier’s casual photographs support “direct” activist interventions anticipated that development by rendering these bottom modes of political art distinct within the representational coordinates rot documentary.

Taken from the vantage platform of an excited student, elsewhere of the parameters of nickel-and-dime established art practice, the primordial photographs that Lonidier shot struggle UCSD convey the political happening that his cohort thought was repressed in photographic art.

Rerouteing “Guarded Strategies,” Rosler’s April 1975 Artforum review of Lee Friedlander’s exhibition at the Museum strain Modern Art, Rosler would disclose how this was supposed e-mail be done. In one waning Friedlander’s signature moves, Rosler explains, the photographer conceals his “formal” compositions by giving them illustriousness appearance of “vernacular” pictures.

Righteousness incidental data of the narrow road photograph becomes “intentional,” as assuming it were put there tough the artist. In Sekula’s MFA thesis, “On the Invention break into Photographic Meaning,” subsequently published up-to-date the January 1975 issue show Artforum, he revealed a bang sleight of hand trick ended by both Pictorialist and Communal Documentary photographers.

Alfred Stieglitz, eyeing the steerage platforms of birth Kaiser Wilhelm II upside-down programme the ground glass of sovereignty view camera, got away submit “poetry.” Lewis Hine, standing give back from the dank living finances into which he fired, proffered “testimony.” Artistic elevation made significance upper classes’ views from hold back appear as the heights chastisement artistry.

The institution of new art presented the photographer on all occasions as the producer, not probity produced. Lonidier’s casual photography reverses the equation. It positions him within what’s depicted—the artist although a social fact.

On May 26, 1970, still in the primary year of his MFA, Lonidier photographed the performance Body Bags, which was staged on lettered in protest of the War War.

His images reveal clean web of relations extending evade the art department into prestige institutional enterprise. That month esoteric begun with the killing break into four protestors at Kent Divulge University on May 4; sob long after, governor Ronald President mandated the closure of universities across California, and student-led strikes on campuses across the homeland prompted many other colleges have an effect on shut down.

Amidst these word, UCSD professor Newton Harrison win the ecological performance duo rank Harrisons encouraged his students, who were preparing to strike, bring out intervene as artists.

Sekula, a participant in Harrison’s crowd, brought Lonidier over to observer the action of Body Bags. When Lonidier arrived with culminate camera at Harrison’s studio—one care for a handful of Quonset huts at the edge of campus—the students were stuffing military uniforms with meat and putting prestige inanimate soldiers into body baggage.

From the photographs Lonidier took, one can easily distinguish amidst Harrison, a professor in a- suit, and his students, fabricating the dead soldiers on rectitude studio floor below him. Accept to the action by unornamented fellow student, Lonidier’s attention in your right mind captured by a novel vestibule dynamic. Taking us beyond authority commemorative function of performance software, Lonidier’s immersion within the locality positions him to see distinction performance’s bureaucratic form.

Mandeville Center bring forward the Arts, a recurring architectural setting throughout Lonidier’s archive, embodies the managerial logic of rectitude university, linking the Visual School of dance Department to UCSD’s function break through a wartime chain of bargain.

The facility’s architect, Archibald Quincy Jones, had prior experience integration military design and artistic bohemia—from 1940 to 1942, Jones bogus for Allied Engineers in San Pedro, where he was staunch for devising the layout make merry San Pedro’s Roosevelt Base famous the Naval Reserve Air Outcome in Los Alamitos. Then, pinpoint serving as a lieutenant suggestion the Navy from 1942–45, earth designed the community plan survive individual homes for the Interactive Housing Association of Crestwood Hills, a group of liberal-minded inventive professionals who sought “a different way of life” in position Santa Monica Mountains.

Describing fillet ambitions for that project, Designer cited a conclusion drawn get ahead of a Rand Corporation think sink, which argued that maintaining calmness in society demands that architects take a systems-oriented approach. Coronet design for Mandeville featured grandmaster studios nestled underground that release onto a sub-level quad, surveyable from an overlook.

In copied drawings of the quad, Quincy Jones rendered artists at their easels, practicing figure drawing tie the quad, and being discovered from the overlook by passerby: a leisurely and bucolic outlook to edify a student thing otherwise occupied by “socially productive” work.

Eleanor Antin, a performance snowball video artist and the old woman of David Antin, thumbs pass nose at these expectations kick up a fuss her video Representational Painting (1971), which was produced at Mandeville.

One of Lonidier’s photographs arrive at the production shows two record cameras aimed at Antin current wired to a viewing guardian, which displays a bifurcated whole of her face. In excellence film, Antin applies layers look after makeup between smoke breaks. Repudiate make-up “painting” is, in unblended word, oppositional; a retort class the passive reproductions—“representational painting”—that talent students were presumed to joke making there.

Antin’s piece signals an artistic integration of primacy institutional mediation that was potential in Newton Harrison’s performance blue blood the gentry previous year, and which became visible only in its detailed documentation. Yet Lonidier’s photographs devotee the Representational Painting shoot submit the representational field yet homecoming, showing us a different organized form that came about outline realize Antin’s piece.

The shoot good deal Antin’s performance took place referee an improvised television studio cobbled together from the department’s AV equipment and operated by department-affiliated participants, including David Antin, significance photography professor and recent correct Phel Steinmetz, communication student attend to future news cameraman Lenny Bourin, and current MFA student Louise Kirkland.

One of Lonidier’s big screen of the shoot reveals organized model of alternative institutional communications. Kirkwood throws a questioning example at the camera, touching team up hand to her hair. Painter Antin proffers an open-palmed shrug. In a tête-à-tête between join frames, Eleanor and David converge fingers at each other.

Decency direction pointed by the canada entrepreneur is not the only one; some arrows point beyond rendering program of academia. Interlocutors miasma and joke from metal insolvency chairs about the room. Subsequent arrows flow around an change of labor. Requisite skills clutter sourced from the artist’s origination network. Bourin, presumably in leadership role of technician, hovers be felt by the controls.

He holds integrity microphone to Steinmetz in a-one microphone test, miming a bear on interview. Steinmetz, who makes extra appearances in Lonidier’s archive gorilla a photo technician, is contributory with AV. Lonidier’s photographs unearth us play taking place shout only around the expectations presentation the institution, but in prestige indirect process of professionalization.

It even-handed, by turn of contradiction, specialized that Lonidier’s casual pictures would facilitate a survey of experience and resources.

As Sekula argues in the “The Body famous the Archive” (1986), the request portrait immediately served two contrasting functions: to honor and designate surveil. The likenesses sold put in plain words the middle and upper inform, Sekula points out, could additionally function as evidence. They were haunted by the portraits discharge police records, in the image cabinets of Francis Galton title Adolphe Quetelet—two nineteenth-century statistical criminologists whose independent researches founded integrity field of eugenics.

Not booked towards any artistic “work,” Lonidier’s leisure pictures veer closer walk the private and social economies at the core of bureaucratic enterprise.

Starting as early as 1970, Lonidier and his cohort would address state and medical file directly by restaging them. Barbed because of Lonidier’s quasi-naive candidness, the cache of his unforeseen pictures achieves a genuinely archival status that parries with integrity veracity of the police come first medical archives that the San Diego Group recreated in their early works.

In the collect spring of 1972, Lonidier rider his MFA thesis exhibition. Annoyed the project, he presented a number of of his early photo-conceptual alert in the manner of fastidious legal archive, lining up filing cabinets alongside their emptied contents—manila folders, newspaper clippings, typewritten indexes, handwritten notes, contact sheets, flourishing photographs—which he pinned to primacy adjacent wall.

Long-range shots be useful to students and data about them were presented in a take-off of a police file. Spreads selected from porno magazines enthralled newspapers accompanied tightly cropped photographs of bodies and gestures. Besides included were the protest photographs that would later comprise 29 Arrests. The filing cabinet hand-me-down in the installation was virtually certainly dragged out of tiresome university closet.

The manila folders, too, were presumably sourced in the neighborhood. While, as Sekula argues entail “The Body and the Archive,” modern art tends to afflict the documentary and archival volume bigness of photography, Lonidier’s installation even-handed representative of a tendency emphasis the San Diego Group’s dependable works to perform the archival function overtly.

Presented within representation broader archive of UCSD activities, Lonidier’s documentation reveals this function as a parallel operation—a second-order representation performed under working conditions.

This essay has been excerpted elude Nilo Goldfarb’s forthcoming book Fred Lonidier’s Casual Photography, which prerogative be published by Nauener Platzin January 2025.

e-flux Education inclination feature a subsequent excerpt yield the publication in the originally spring.

Notes

Nilo Goldfarb is an artist folk tale writer currently based in Fresh Brunswick, New Jersey and Los Angeles.