Perhaps not effective in your eyes, but it did something in his eyes. Whether he saw it or not when shooting, (I'd guess he did, and may even have moved his position to cut the dog in half), he certainly saw it in the editing phase. A very consistant trait in Friedlander's work is always playing with such photographic conventions.
Modernism with a Capital M goes back to the early twentieth century for photography, (mid- to late nineteenth for painting), but thankfully, you used the small m! Current trends seem all over the place, and have since the 1970's. Maybe it's always been that way, and the more distant past seems more coherent because it's all been sorted out for us. Today everybody seems to be jumping on different bandwagons or striking out on their own, trying to be the next big thing, or at least get in on it. Soooo many different directions... and to quote Harry Nilsson, "a point in every direction is the same as no point at all."
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