Navigation arrows appear bottom right
Click on each image to view in isolation
New Documents - 'snapshot aesthetic' - wide-angle - self-portraits - projects and collections - nudes - shadows and reflections - shadow self-portraits - Americana - cars and trucks - signs - influence
. . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
New Documents
New Documents was an exhibition mounted in 1967 by John Szarkowski at the MoMA, NY. It featured three relatively unknown photographers, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander. Winogrand went on to make a career as a dedicated 'street photographer', Arbus became known for her portraits, particularly of unglamorous, sometimes vulnerable subjects. Friedlander's career has been longer and more varied than either of the other two.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Publications
This is only a partial list of Friedlander's publications:
- E.J. Bellocq: Storyville Portraits. Photographs from the New Orleans Red-Light District, Circa 1912. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970. With a preface by Friedlander.
- Self Portrait. New City, NY: Self-published / Haywire Press, 1970.
- The American Monument. New York: Eakins Press Foundation, 1976. ISBN 0-87130-043-5.
- Lee Friedlander Photographs. New City, NY: Self-published / Haywire Press, 1978.
- Factory Valleys: Ohio & Pennsylvania. New York: Callaway Editions, 1982. ISBN 0-935112-04-9.
- Lee Friedlander Portraits. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985. ISBN 0-8212-1602-3.
- Like a One-Eyed Cat: Photographs by Lee Friedlander, 1956–1987. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Seattle Art Museum, 1989. ISBN 0-8109-1274-0.
- CRAY at Chippewa Falls: Photographs by Lee Friedlander, Cray Research, Inc., 1987. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 86-73134
- Nudes. New York: Pantheon, 1991. ISBN 0-679-40484-8.
- The Jazz People of New Orleans. New York: Pantheon, 1992. ISBN 0-679-41638-2.
- Maria. Washington: Smithsonian, 1992. ISBN 1-56098-207-1.
- Letters from the People. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1993. ISBN 1-881616-05-3. London: Jonathan Cape, 1993. ISBN 9780224032957.
- Bellocq: Photographs from Storyville, the Red-Light District of New Orleans. New York: Random House, 1996. ISBN 0-679-44975-2.
- The Desert Seen. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1996. ISBN 1-881616-75-4.
- Viewing Olmsted: Photographs by Robert Burley, Lee Friedlander, and Geoffrey James. Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1996. ISBN 0-920785-58-1. By Phyllis Lambert.[12]
- American Musicians: Photographs by Lee Friedlander. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1998. ISBN 1-56466-056-7. By Friedlander, Steve Lacy, and Ruth Brown.
- Lee Friedlander. San Francisco: Fraenkel Gallery, 2000. ISBN 1-881337-09-X.
- Lee Friedlander at Work. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2002. ISBN 1-891024-48-5.
- Stems. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2003. ISBN 1-891024-75-2.
- Lee Friedlander: Sticks and Stones: Architectural America. San Francisco: Fraenkel Gallery, 2004. ISBN 1-891024-97-3. By Friedlander and James Enyeart.
- Friedlander. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005. ISBN 0-87070-343-9. By Peter Galassi.
- Cherry Blossom Time in Japan: The Complete Works. San Francisco: Fraenkel Gallery, 2006. ISBN 1-881337-20-0.
- Lee Friedlander: New Mexico. Santa Fe, NM: Radius Books, 2008. ISBN 978-1-934435-11-3. By Friedlander, Andrew Smith, and Emily Ballew Neff.
- Photographs: Frederick Law Olmsted Landscapes. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2008. ISBN 978-1933045733.
- America by Car. San Francisco: Fraenkel Gallery, 2010. ISBN 978-1-935202-08-0.
- Portraits: The Human Clay: Volume 1. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2015. ISBN 978-0-300-21520-5.
- Children: The Human Clay: Volume 2. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2015. ISBN 978-0-300-21519-9.
- Street: The Human Clay: Volume 3. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2016. ISBN 978-0-300-22177-0.
- Head. Oakland, CA: TBW Books, 2017. Subscription Series #5, Book #4. ISBN 978-1-942953-28-9. Edition of 1000 copies. Friedlander, Mike Mandel, Susan Meiselas and Bill Burke each had one book in a set of four.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Although the New Documents exhibition led to only one sale, it brought him to the attention of the Pop artist Jim Dine and the two men worked subsequently on a book collaboration (photographs and etchings) called Work from the Same House (1969). That book was well received, enabling Friedlander to consolidate his position as one of the new photographic provocateurs a year later through his first solo book, Self Portrait.
The following book covers give some sense of the diversity, but also the consistency, of Friedlander's long career.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
So, how does one man end up with so many published collections ?
“I just work and I throw the pictures in a box that says “X” or whatever, and eventually if the box gets full it merits looking at. I often work on two or three or four of those things at once. People tell me that they all look like they’ve been well thought out, and that’s because I’ve worked on them for so long."
“In a way it gets rid of infatuation."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Beginnings
Friedlander was born in Aberdeen, Washington on July 14, 1934 to Kaari Nurmi (of Finnish descent) and Fritz (Fred) Friedlander (a German-Jewish émigré). His mother, Kaari, died of cancer when he was seven years old.
Friedlander first stumbled upon photography when he was around five years old. He went on an errand to pick up portraits of his father at the local photography studio, and randomly stubmled into the darkroom. He was wowed by the experience of seeing an image appear on a blank piece of paper in the darkroom, almost like an apparition.
In high school, he worked in a camera shop, and assisted a local portrait photographer, and picked up tips from Stan Spiegel (a local DJ and freelance photographer). At 16, Friedlander got an Omega D-2 enlarger and all the fixings so he could really focus on his own budding freelance career. He received many odd jobs forwarded by Spiegel that kickstarted his move into freelance photography.
At the age of 18 he went to study photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. However he quickly got bored with the introduction to photography course, as he had already learned everything he needed through doing odd assignments while in high school.
What he started to do instead is to visit the advanced painting course by photographer and painter Edward Kaminski. When the College objected to his casual engagement with his photographic studies, he left and was taken in and mentored by Kaminski.
Eugène Atget, Walker Evans and Robert Frank were early influences. Friedlander would frequently shape his itinery so that he could spend whole days studying photographs and photobooks in museum collections and libraries. He studied the work of FSA in the 1930s and was particularly taken by the early use of wide-angle lenses by Ben Shahn.
In 1956, he moved to New York City, where he photographed jazz musicians for record covers, many of them for Atlantic Records. Friedlander remained a life-long jazz fan.
.
Lee Friedlander's "The Little Screens" first appeared as a 1963 picture essay in Harper's Bazaar, with commentary by Walker Evans. Six untitled photographs show television screens broadcasting glowing images of faces and figures into unoccupied rooms in homes and motels across America.
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The American Monument
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“Somebody else could walk two feet away to get those poles and trees and other stuff out of the way, I almost walk two feet to get into it, because it is a part of the game that I play. It isn’t even conscious; I probably just drift into it… its like a found pleasure. You’ve found something that you like and you play with it for the rest of your life.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Signs, lettering, messages provided another theme or topic that Friedlander was able to play with throughout his career. Signs recorded all kinds of official or commercial signage. Letters from the People focussed on messages, graffitti... the unofficial, handworked, side of signs.
Work has been another life-long preoccupation. In the early 1980s Friedlander was commissioned to photograph at the CRAY supercomputer facility. Another of his projects focussed on various factories and the valleys they came to dominate.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Friedlander is a markedly private person, and has given very few interviews. On the other hand self-portraits have been a constant preoccupation, occasionally taking the form of his shadow entering the composition.
In his introduction to Friedlander, the 2008 major retrospective publication, Peter Galassi, commenting on the fact that a photographer getting his or her shadow in the frame is usually considered a very basic mistake, goes on to say:
“Friedlander, though, in a manner that was fast becoming a hallmark of his work, went after the idea like a dog for a bone, encouraging his surrogate self to behave like a charater with a mindlessness of his own. His shadow became the protagonist of mini dramas of the street; or sometimes it was just the dopey bystander, or the nosy jerk who cant resist poking his head into things...."
"... Friedlander’s reflection, too, offered a wealth of opportunities for comic self-deprecation. Many of these picture are like in-jokes at a photographer’s convention, send-ups of the trials and tribulations of the trade.”
His book, Maria, celebrated six decades in the life of his wife.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
In 1979, an unknown 21-year-old named Madonna Ciccone answered an ad seeking nude models to be photographed by Lee Friedlander. The model who would eventually be known by just her first name — Madonna — signed a model release and was paid £25, then went back to the work of becoming a pop star. When the photographs resurfaced on the pages of Playboy magazine in 1985, Madonna was well on her way to becoming one of the biggest pop stars of all time.
Lamp-posts, telegraph poles: Friedlander has made a practice of incorporating the kind of obstructions that other photographers try to avoid. Chain Link is another of that kind of obstruction . . . architectural, visual.
“The wider the angle is, the more it’s possible to respond instinctively, because the more everything in the picture reads as if it were in focus, even if it might not be. In that picture we were discussing yesterday, not everything is really sharp; you can’t really see what that little tree is. But in terms of the picture’s literature, it says everything it needs to say, and it's perfectly fine…
I think that is part of the trick of a wide-angle lens—that it allows you to have more stuff, maybe in the foreground or in the background, whichever way you want to think about it. Even if something is a little but out of focus, it has a tendency to feel as if it was married to the other stuff.”
One reason he also enjoyed shooting with a Hasselblad later in his career is the fact that he was able to utilize the square-format to add more content into his images:
“It seemed to be the same rectangle with more sky on top…I always wanted more sky out of a horizontal picture. All of a sudden, the whole tree is in the picture.”
The plants and trees that feature in Friedlander's collections lend themselves to Friedlander's characteristically informal compositions.
While suffering from arthritis and housebound, he focused on photographing his surroundings. His book Stems reflects his life during the time of his knee replacement surgery. He has said that his "limbs" reminded him of plant stems.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Mind and the Hand is a collection of 6 books, each one devoted to snapshots of one of his photographer friends: Richard Benson, William Christenberry, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, John Szarkwoski and Garry Winogrand.
On 'taking', rather than 'making' photographs
“Sometimes working with a camera, somebody does something that’s just beyond belief. Garry Winogrand takes pictures of things that in your wildest dreams you wouldn’t think could exist in the world. Theres a picture of a cow’s tongue in a cowboy’s hat that becomes a beautiful thing; it looks like a piece of architecture...
. . . In your wildest dreams you couldn’t come up with that and that’s just because he was aware that it might be possible. He was there when it happened and his head worked that way. Or look at that couple on fifth avenue with the monkey that looks like a family. Nutty pictures, but the most imaginative person in the world would not come up with that set of things.”
Friedlander spoke of his visits to the various fashion shows that make up the New York Fashion Week in relation to his preoccupation with the theme of 'work'. His photos are all taken in B&W, and portrait/vertical format. They don't have quite the wit or variety of Tunbjörk's Paris adventures, two years earlier.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The last new book / project of Friedlander's that I have been aware of is his series of photos of mannequins. As with the fashion week photos, these B&W photos are all taken in the vertical or portrait format. Although taken in various American cities, most of the images feature the reflection of the surrounding skyscrapers.
When his Mannequins was published as a book (2012) I was naturally very excited. I had quite a big collection of photos of mannequins, assembled over decades. These photos had a connection with my translation of Walter Benjamin's "Central Park", a collection of notes, mainly on Baudelaire, commodity capitalism and the modern city. Benjamin had also stimulated my interest in Atget and Kertész, who were both also fascinated by the statue-like lives of mannequins. Friedlander's Mannequins were less diverse than my own and I was a little disappointed.
I have felt the influence of Friedlander's photos throughout the four decades that I have been taking photos seriously. I have felt the impact of some of his most special photos and unusual compositions but also his willingness to take repeated, unresolved photos of mundane subject matter. Below are my photos. Can you see the connection?
Credits:
All photos downloaded from the internet and here under 'fair use' provisions solely in support of education.