Capturing the Friedmans task

"All photographs are momento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or things) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt".

Sontag's powerful set of essays on the nature and impact of photography in the modern world has a special significance to the tale that filmmaker Andrew Jarecki tells about the life and times of the Friedman family. This is because the Freidmans were a family that was forever recording themselves using a variety of still, cine- and digital video cameras. It is this archive of images that provides an extraordinary insight into their lives as they effectively disintegrate. When all was in 'free-fall', the future filled with court proceedings and then committal hearings and then imprisonment, they, when most ordinary people would switch off all cameras, kept filming.

Look at three images from the documentary. The stills occur at the following points in the documentary:

About a half-hour into the documentary there is a montage of Friedman family pictures and film including the one of the three boys and their mother. She looks awkward, bent double and being leant on by the biggest boy. It looks as if, almost, she is being pushed out of the frame. It is the same image that appears on the front of the Press Pack.

Image two occurs as one among a number of shots taken inside the Friedman house during the first search conducted by John McDermott the postal inspector.

Image three is found soon after the police's admission that there was a dearth of physical evidence relating to the crimes Arnold and his son Jesse were meant to have committed. We are told by Detective Frances Gelasso that the house was crammed with child pornography everywhere and yet the images of the house that were taken belie this suggesting a very ordered series of interiors.

Now, look at these three images:

The first is of the three Friedman boys (from left to right - Seth; Jesse and David) and their mother, Elaine (on the extreme left). Two of the boys are holding up mini-American flags.

Your task is to attempt an analysis of the image. What is your impression of this family? What is the relationship between the boys and what is your reaction to Elaine, their mother, and how she is shown here?

The second image is of the piano in Arnold Freedman's study. What is your impression of this room and the person who might use it as their study?

The third image is a shot of the Friedman's living room. What is your impression of this room?

After you have discussed and written up your views of these three images, click here to go to the explanations of these images.

What should emerge once you have checked the original use of these images is that context is everything. An innocuous-looking interior can suddenly acquire terrible significance depending on the events that may have taken place there. Similarly, the same interior, by virtue of its very ordinariness can serve to disrupt a version of events that otherwise seem cut and dried. Such ambiguity and such openness to interpretation go to the heart of documentary too.