Local scenes featured in photographer's first book

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For photographer Victor Friedman, art is instinctive. For 45 years, Mr. Friedman has been capturing images of life in the neighborhoods he has been touched by—around Long Island, where he spends most of his week in his Shelter Island home; New York City, where he grew up and now lives and works for part of the week; and Brooklyn, where he felt connected to the “ultra-orthodox” Jewish community—but it was only in retrospect that he realized so many of his images contained the American flag, and he developed the idea of publishing them together as a book.

“It was unconscious at first,” Mr. Friedman said. “I would photograph things that were very interesting to me and when I looked at the work I was aware that a lot of the things I had photographed had a flag in them. So I kept doing it and finally, after 45 years, I said, ‘Wait a minute, this could be a book.’”

“Flag,” a soft-cover book of Mr. Friedman’s black-and-white photographs, all containing the American flag, shows how Americans interact with and appreciate the flag in their daily lives. Some of the photographs document events that surround the flag—an American Legion member being honored or a Shelter Island Memorial Day parade—while some of them show flags in

odd places: mounted on a city wall behind a transvestite or displayed on a radio next to girls in bikinis at a beach party.

Mr. Friedman, whose grandparents emigrated from Russia and Poland, said the book is about the pride of being American. He said the book expresses feelings he thinks most people don’t acknowledge.

“The book is about how we actually live with the flag and how we show it and use it and we’re sort of proud of it,” he said. “It’s something we never really talk about or say, but it’s there and you respond to it.”

Mr. Friedman, 79, who says he has always loved art, called the book the fulfillment of a fantasy of his and the highlight of his career so far. His wife, Leah, is also an artist, and he said he originally wanted to be a painter but was “terrible” at it. Mr. Friedman, who has been a hairdresser at the Kenneth Salon in New York for 46 years, came into photography almost accidentally.

He said he bought his first camera to help his wife photograph her own work, immediately took to the 
medium and just “has not stopped doing it.” Mr. Friedman works from a darkroom in his Shelter Island home and said he has no plans to switch to digital because of his love for the craft as a whole, which includes developing and printing.

“To print the photo in a way that’s most effective, it’s as creative and important for me as taking the photograph itself,” he said.

“Flag” shows just one area of Mr. Friedman’s work, he said. He also has a series of nudes overlaid with landscapes, seascapes and still lifes, which he credits as being inspired by artists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

“They took the straightforward and changed it and made it look different and beautiful,” Mr. Friedman said, so he worked with the figure in photography to get a “Picasso-feeling” of having shapes and figures intertwined.

Mr. Friedman’s work is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of the City of New York, and has been featured in galleries in New York and Philadelphia, as well as internationally in Mexico, Israel and Germany. Some of his work is currently on view in an exhibition at the Pamela Williams Gallery in Amagansett through November 21. The exhibit will feature some of the photographs published in “Flag” as well as Mr. Friedman’s other work.

Mr. Friedman said he is thrilled at the state of his artwork right now, the recognition that he’s receiving and the number of people being exposed to it. He said that in the evolution of his artwork, he’s never sure where it will go next, but that when something intrigues him, he follows it.

“You just keep moving in all these directions, you just keep doing it,” he said. “I think anybody involved in the creative process knows that it just goes on.”