Capturing Everyday Life: The Art of Fred Lonidier’s Candid Photography – Volume 1

Fred Lonidier captured the images that now form the University of California San Diego Visual Arts Department History Archive using a 35mm camera that he carried daily since the late 1960s, transitioning from art student to professor. During this same timeframe, Lonidier along with his contemporaries, Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula, known collectively as the San Diego Group, initiated the project recognized by historians as “the reinvention of documentary,” which sought to reshape the genre in support of the labor class. Reflecting on past movements, from journalism and Soviet factography to the Farm Security Administration, the San Diego Group developed their own methodologies for creating critical distance: photographing with specific guidelines, recontextualizing visuals, and framing them with text. Their artistic creations and writings turned photography and the archival form into subjects of scrutiny. Nevertheless, Lonidier was simply taking photographs—capturing what piqued his interest, one might say.

In illustrating his photographic endeavors, Lonidier states: “It’s akin to walking sideways like a crab. I’m looking straight ahead, thinking I want to go this way, but things unfold, and I find myself over there—there was this gravitational pull of photography on me without my full awareness of it!” Before joining the UCSD art department, Lonidier had a pivotal experience with the political aspects of photography while participating in the anti-war movement. His activism, which began as a sociology student at San Francisco State University in the mid-sixties, escalated when he graduated and became subject to the draft. In 1967, he enlisted in the Peace Corps in the Philippines with his first wife, Paulette Liang, but his stay was abruptly ended by a presidential appeal that revoked his draft deferral. Before leaving, Lonidier penned and published a letter to the editors of the Philippine Free Press and Manila Times, arguing that the American interruption of his service was a refutation of the nation’s assertion of being “on the side of peace.” This letter gained him media attention upon his return flight home, just two and a half months later: during stopovers in Manila and Hawaii, he encountered journalists from United Press, Associated Press, and Agence France; and at the San Francisco International Airport, he was met by reporters from American television networks and brought to a podium complete with “camera microphones affixed to it like a mushroom cloud.”

Lonidier’s initial collection of photographs, now known as the “Fred Lonidier Draft Resistance-Seattle Collection” at the University of Washington, arose from an awareness that his future lay within the files of the draft review board and before TV news cameras. After returning to the US, he became active in anti-draft activism, utilizing photography to counter the cameras held by the police and the media. He moved to Seattle, where his politically active aunt and uncle provided him shelter. There he met Russel Wills, another draft resister, and along with Liang and Wills’s spouse, Cynthia Wills, they established Draft Resistance Seattle. Lonidier’s photographs from this era document the group’s activities, including protests, sit-ins, and the trials faced by other resisters. Featured in The Agitator and various underground publications to promote strategically organized civil disobedience, these images represented political action. Within them, we observe young activists burning draft cards and opposing arrest. They capture the emotions of an activist deeply engaged in the movement, as he and his contemporaries consistently confronted the restrictions imposed by law enforcement and the government. These photos, shot amidst the struggle, foreshadow the dialectical tactic he would later employ in one of his early conceptual works, 29 Arrests (1972).

During his second year in the UCSD MFA program, Lonidier participated in a Vietnam War protest in San Diego. Arriving with 29 frames left on his roll of 35mm film, he took the pictures that he would eventually compile into 29 Arrests, a matrix of monochrome prints. At the demonstration, Lonidier positioned himself behind a police photographer, who was capturing mugshots of demonstrators amid a mass arrest. His camera provided an alternative perspective, facilitating a shift in viewpoint that placed him outside another ritualized clash with law enforcement. As the demonstrators posed for Lonidier’s lens, their facial expressions varied from a subtle, determined smile to a mocking laugh. These expressions transcended mere reactions; they transformed into transmissions in a relay between the demonstrators, caught in a framework of state control, and Lonidier’s camera, positioned just beyond it. The visuals and their later presentation constituted a conceptual gesture that could only have stemmed from a conventional photographic habit and familiarity with his environment. Lonidier’s critical distance was rooted in his immersion.

When Lonidier sought admission to the UCSD MFA program in 1969, department head David Antin invited him into the program due to his candid, non-artistic application of the camera, which resonated with Antin’s own everyday speech poetics. Lonidier’s images offered his peers an illustration of “ordinary” photography instead of an artistic reinterpretation of the medium. He provided his classmates with a tangible model, in contrast to an idealized concept (for example, one derived from memory). The direct photographic quality of Lonidier’s works also corresponded with discussions surrounding photorealism featured in various painting exhibitions from 1970 onwards. In this series of realism-centered exhibits, the 1975 “Sense of Reference” exhibition at UCSD, which opened the university’s Mandeville Center for the Arts, stood out by showcasing works from Hans Haacke, Nancy Holt, and Robert Smithson alongside the usual photorealists, such as Robert Cottingham. As their political philosophies crystallized, conceptual artists studying at UCSD, particularly Rosler and Sekula, began to concentrate on the mediation of political existence through documentary photography. Lonidier’s unpretentious photos of “direct” activist actions presaged this evolution by rendering earlier forms of political art intelligible within the documentary’s representational frameworks.

Viewed through the lens of an enthusiastic student, beyond the confines of an established art practice, the earliest images that Lonidier captured at UCSD embody the political contingency that his peers believed was suppressed in photographic artistry. In “Guarded Strategies,” Rosler’s April 1975 review in Artforum of Lee Friedlander’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Rosler illustrated how this was meant to be executed. One of Friedlander’s hallmark maneuvers, as explained by Rosler, involved the photographer masking his “formal” compositions by making them appear as “vernacular” images. The incidental elements of the street photograph become “intentional,” as though placed there by the artist. In Sekula’s MFA thesis “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” later published in the January 1975 issue of Artforum, he exhibited a comparable sleight of hand.

A ruse executed by both Pictorialist and Social Documentary photographers. Alfred Stieglitz, observing the steerage platforms of the Kaiser Wilhelm II inverted on the ground glass of his view camera, managed to create “poetry.” Lewis Hine, distancing himself from the damp living spaces he captured, provided “testimony.” The artistic elevation rendered the upper classes’ perspectives from above to seem like the pinnacle of artistry. The framework of modern art consistently portrayed the photographer as the creator, not the created. Lonidier’s informal photography alters this dynamic. It situates him within the scene depicted—the artist as a social reality.

On May 26, 1970, still in the initial year of his MFA, Lonidier captured the performance Body Bags, which took place on campus in protest against the Vietnam war. His photographs disclose a network of connections stretching from the art department into the institutional mechanism. That month commenced with the shooting of four protestors at Kent State University on May 4; shortly thereafter, governor Ronald Reagan ordered the closure of universities throughout California, and student-led strikes on campuses nationwide compelled numerous other colleges to suspend operations. Amidst these occurrences, UCSD professor Newton Harrison, part of the ecological performance duo the Harrisons, urged his students, who were ready to strike, to participate as artists. Sekula, a member of Harrison’s class, brought Lonidier to observe the event of Body Bags. Upon Lonidier’s arrival with his camera at Harrison’s studio—one of several Quonset huts at the campus’s fringe—the students were filling military attire with meat and placing the lifeless soldiers into body bags. From the images captured by Lonidier, one can clearly differentiate between Harrison, a professor attired in a suit, and his students, constructing the deceased soldiers on the studio floor beneath him. Invited to the event by a fellow student, Lonidier’s gaze is drawn to a unique classroom dynamic. Taking us beyond the memorial role of performance documentation, Lonidier’s integration into the scene enables him to perceive the bureaucratic nature of the performance.

The Mandeville Center for the Arts, a recurring architectural framework throughout Lonidier’s collection, encapsulates the administrative logic of the university, connecting the Visual Arts Department to UCSD’s role in a wartime production chain. The center’s architect, Archibald Quincy Jones, had previous experience merging military design with artistic bohemia—from 1940 to 1942, Jones collaborated with Allied Engineers in San Pedro, where he was tasked with developing the layout of San Pedro’s Roosevelt Base and the Naval Reserve Air Base in Los Alamitos. Following his service as a lieutenant in the Navy from 1942–45, he crafted the community plan and individual residences for the Mutual Housing Association of Crestwood Hills, a collective of liberal-minded creative individuals seeking “a new way of life” in the Santa Monica Mountains. Detailing his aspirations for that initiative, Jones referenced a conclusion drawn by a Rand Corporation think tank, which asserted that sustaining social balance necessitates architects to adopt a systems-oriented approach. His design for Mandeville showcased artist studios positioned underground, opening onto a sub-level quad, observable from an overlook. In simulation sketches of the quad, Quincy Jones illustrated artists at their easels, practicing figure drawing in the quad, and being observed from the overlook by passersby: a leisurely and pastoral sight meant to enlighten a student body otherwise engaged in “socially productive” tasks.

Eleanor Antin, a performance and video artist and the spouse of David Antin, defies these anticipations in her video Representational Painting (1971), produced at Mandeville. One of Lonidier’s photographs of the session depicts two video cameras aimed at Antin and connected to a viewing monitor that exhibits a split composite of her face. In the film, Antin applies layers of makeup during smoke breaks. Her makeup “painting” is, to put it simply, oppositional; a rebuttal against the passive reproductions—“representational painting”—that art students were assumed to be creating there. Antin’s work signifies an artistic amalgamation of the institutional mediation that was latent in Newton Harrison’s performance the preceding year, which only became apparent through its photographic documentation. Nevertheless, Lonidier’s photographs from the Representational Painting shoot further broaden the representational landscape, revealing a different social form that emerged to actualize Antin’s piece.

The shoot of Antin’s performance unfolded in an improvised television studio assembled from the department’s AV equipment and operated by department-associated participants, including David Antin, the photography instructor and recent graduate Phel Steinmetz, communication student and future news cameraman Lenny Bourin, and current MFA student Louise Kirkland. One of Lonidier’s pictures of the shoot showcases a model of alternative institutional relationships. Kirkwood casts a questioning glance at the camera, touching her hand to her hair. David Antin presents an open-palmed shrug. In a tête-à-tête between two frames, Eleanor and David point fingers at each other. The direction indicated by the auteur isn’t the exclusive one; some arrows extend beyond the academic program. Participants smoke and joke from metal folding chairs scattered around the room. Additional arrows circulate around a labor exchange. Essential skills are sourced from the artist’s university network. Bourin, likely in the technician’s role, hovers over the controls. He positions the microphone toward Steinmetz during a sound check, imitating a television interview. Steinmetz, who makes further appearances in Lonidier’s archive as a photography technician, assists with AV operations. Lonidier’s photographs illustrate play occurring not only around the expectations of the institution but also in the indirect processes of professional development.

It is, paradoxically, sensible that Lonidier’s informal images would enable an examination of labor and resources. As Sekula articulates in “The Body and the Archive” (1986), the portrait immediately served two contrary purposes: to honor and to surveil. The likenesses sold to the middle and upper classes, as Sekula highlights, could also act as evidence. They were shadowed by the portraits found in police records, in the portrait collections of Francis Galton and Adolphe Quetelet—two nineteenth-century statistical criminologists whose independent studies laid the groundwork for the field of eugenics. Not oriented toward any artistic “work,” Lonidier’s casual images gravitate closer to the private and social economies central to institutional endeavors.

Beginning as early as 1970, Lonidier and his peers began to confront state and medical archives directly by restaging them. Precisely due to Lonidier’s almost naïve neutrality, the collection of his casual images achieves a truly archival status that engages with the authenticity of the police and medical archives that the San Diego Group recreated in their initial works. In late spring of 1972, Lonidier held his MFA thesis exhibition. For this project, he displayed several of his early photo-conceptual works in the style of a legal archive, aligning filing cabinets alongside their emptied contents—manila folders, newspaper clippings, typewritten indexes, handwritten notes, contact sheets, and photographs—which he affixed to the adjacent wall. Long-range shots of students and information about them were presented in an exaggerated representation of a police file. Selected spreads from pornographic magazines and newspapers accompanied tightly cropped images of bodies and gestures. Included were the protest photographs that would later form 29 Arrests. The filing cabinet utilized in the installation was undoubtedly retrieved from some university storage. The manila folders were likely sourced locally as well. While, as Sekula argues in “The Body and the Archive,” modern art tends to obscure the documentary and archival aspects of photography, Lonidier’s installation exemplifies a tendency within the San Diego Group’s early works to overtly perform the archival function. Positioned within the broader archive of UCSD activities, Lonidier’s documentation reveals this performance as a parallel operation—a secondary representation executed under working conditions.

This essay has been extracted from Nilo Goldfarb’s upcoming book Fred Lonidier’s Casual Photography, which is set to be released by Osloer Str Press in January 2025. e-flux Education will showcase a subsequent excerpt in early spring.