Art is often accused of being contrived, especially in comparison to nature. But some of New York's most well-loved natural landscapes are themselves largely artificial, so it's interesting to see an artist like a photographer double-back on a landscaper's craft. Photographer Lee Friedlander did exactly that with with a lens pointed at the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, the co-designer of Manhattan's Central Park and Brooklyn's Prospect Park.
Olmsted also was instrumental in designing the 1893 Chicago World Exposition, known as the White City. It was a grandiose neo-classical emporium architecturally notable for its thrown-together ambitions of some of the greatest architects of its age, but also for its flimsy artifice. The grandness was an illusion. Olmsted was separately distracted from his contributions to the White City (some of which are reflected in the electric boats found in Propsect Park) by his involvement in the landscape design of the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. Biltmore is the largest private home in existance in the U.S. and probably the closest America will come to the grandiosity of Versailles.
George Vanderbilt hired Olmsted to design the grounds of Biltmore as a working estate, where timber harvesting, livestock raising, and natural production could virtually create a modern fiefdom. The opulence of the estate home seems to only dwarf the productive uses of the property in a manor that makes the property appear like a Potemkin Village.
Lee Friedlander has captured on film more than three dozen images of Olmsted's premiere public and private works. His photographs dispute any idea that artifice negates beauty. Olmsted's craft and gift was conceiving public places completely apart from their natural environments, and in turn creating something more natural as a refuge for city inhabitants. Heir to the Hudson River school of the pre-industrial age, Friedlander used modern photography to capture manufactured landscape.
