1974

Penny Smith, Woodman, Wisconsin

American, born 1934

Lee Friedlander’s picture of a girl standing on a backyard swing appears to be captured from the flow of life. Yet the girl’s pose recalls the central figure in Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, a much-reproduced fifteenth-century Italian painting. Friedlander, too, presents us with a significant motif, but by recognizing it in the fleeting world around him rather than creating it in a studio.