the journal
Fall Issue 2005
Glen E. Friedman/Recognize/Burning Flags Press
Powerful, peaceful and miraculous and yet so god-damned every day simple as to portray a universal beauty in this world. Recognize chalks up to be way more than somebody's banal pictures of clouds. When I heard that sub-culture photographer and fuck you hero Glen E. Friedman was self-publishing another book I got the itch real bad to see it, but when I heard it was clouds I had to wonder...really? For such an off-topic subject, Friedman really touches something here - spending five years seeing through the camera, out the window of every single flight he boarded - he produced a gorgeously slick monograph. The otherworldly atmospheric spaces are filled with Renaissance perspective but nothing at all to ground you. Made with a Pentax K1000, not some large format crap, these pictures are all at once swirly, rich, dense, soft, sexy and disappearing in an ether in front of you - Joseph Turner, Ansel Adams and Alfred Stieglitz would get in a jealous fight if they saw the symbiotic spreads in this book. There is a great and tumultuous calm reflected in these pages which you may recognize within the features of this earth and within your own being at once. Take me away.
- Seth Butler