art

Some might dismiss the photography of Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus as glorified snapshots, but David Sestak begs to differ. The Lehigh Valley collector has spent the past decade amassing work by post-WWII American photographers because of the bold path they forged. Shooters like Friedlander and Arbus broke the rules of crisp composure and sharp focus set out by Edward Weston and other old-guard contemporaries, establishing a new dictum: It's OK for photographs to be blurry, to have crooked visual slants, to take on a life outside strict portraiture. "I love the sense of daring in their work, in their approach," Sestak says. "They were leaders, not followers." About 60 pieces from his collection are gathered at Doylestown's Michener Art Museum in "Radical Vision: The Revolution in American Photography."

Some of the movement's most important names are here, such as street shooters Louis Faurer and Larry Fink, as well as Friedlander, whose shots are often wistful and clever, such as Route 9 (pictured). "Things other people tried to avoid, he'd put in," Sestak says. "Wires, intersecting objects, shadow. He printed it all with no cropping afterwards." With her intimate studies of New York City's poor, Diane Arbus was certainly a groundbreaker in social documentary shooting, but Sestak's happy the exhibit was able to include similar, probably more deserving, photographers. Danny Lyon documented the civil rights movement while working on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at the University of Chicago, and moved on to travel with the Hell's Angels, producing a visual study en route. Likewise, Susan Meiselas spent two years on the carnival circuit, capturing the lives of strippers. Sestak recently came across some of photojournalist Leon Levinstein's late-'60s dabblings into Super 8 film and was fascinated by how neatly they paralleled his photographic style. The roughly spliced footage of parades and Vietnam War protests were like looking at a Levinstein photo come to life, he muses. And since the tins contained handwritten notes for further editing, he figures it's a safe bet they will be showing publicly at Michener for the first time. "It's like looking at a photographer's contact sheet," Sestak says of the films. "It gets you into the mind of what the process was."

"Radical Vision: The Revolution in American Photography," Jan. 14-May 28; curator's lecture with Stephen Perloff, Feb. 7, 1 p.m.; meet-the-collector event with David Sestak, Feb. 28, 1 p.m., Michener Art Museum, 138 S. Pine St., Doylestown, Pa., 215-340-9800.