Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
With Winogrand's appetite and aplomb but with fewer neuroses than either Winogrand or Arbus; without Mr. Frank's anger or Evans's caustic wit - just by being rather cool and nonchalant, he has, over the years, refined a mischievous but fundamentally rigorous and unforgiving style. Michael Kimmelman The New York Times
Edited with text by Sarah Hermanson Meister. Text by Max Kozloff.
In the past decade a new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life, but to know it. —John Szarkowski
Hbk, 9 x 10.5 in. / 160 pgs / 125 duotone. | 4/25/2017 | In stock $45.00
On Wednesday, April 30, Pratt Institute launches 'Lee Friedlander: The Printed Picture: An Exhibition of Books (1969-2014) & Related Ephemera,' with support from ARTBOOK | D.A.P. Join us for the launch party from 6:30 - 8PM! read the full post
Published by Fraenkel Gallery. Introduction by Joel Coen. Afterword by Frances McDormand.
In his selection of 70 photographs by Lee Friedlander, acclaimed filmmaker Joel Coen focuses on Friedlander’s beautifully strange sense of composition, in which images are off kilter and visually dense, bisected and carved by stop signs and utility poles, store windows and reflections, car doors and windshields or shadows and trees. "As a filmmaker, I liked the idea of creating a sequence that would highlight Lee’s unusual approach to framing—his splitting, splintering, repeating, fracturing and reassembling elements into new and impossible compositions," Coen writes. Featuring work spanning more than 60 years, the book includes selections from some of Friedlander’s most celebrated series, including The American Monument, America by Car, The Little Screens and others, arranged to draw connections between form and composition rather than subject. In an afterword, renowned actor Frances McDormand describes the bond between the two artists: "they both capture and fill frames with sometimes simple and other times chaotically elaborate images that cause us all to wonder." Lee Friedlander (born 1934) began photographing in 1948. Among his more than 50 monographs are Signs, Sticks and Stones, Self-Portrait, Letters from the People, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan and At Work. His work was included in the influential 1967 exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski. Joel Coen (born 1954) is an American filmmaker who, with his younger brother Ethan, has directed films such as Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, True Grit, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man and Hail Caesar.
Published by Eakins Press Foundation. Afterword by Peter Kayafas.
This volume presents 155 photographs spanning 60 years of the artist’s exploration of the built environment in the American social landscape. Collectively these photographs add to one of the broadest and most nuanced visual explorations of America, and, individually, they are filled with the kind of intellectual humor and observation for which Friedlander has become celebrated. Along the way, of course, Friedlander has expanded our ideas of what constitutes real estate, just as he continues to compel us to reconsider how photography reveals essential aspects of our lives over time. The mirror that Lee Friedlander holds up to us is his mirror and everything reflected in it has the common traits of his way of seeing—each picture is definitively a Friedlander picture. Real Estate is an essential collection of one of Friedlander’s lifelong subjects, and takes its place alongside other classic titles of his quest to photograph the ever-changing social landscape: The People’s Pictures (2021), Signs (2019), The American Monument (1976/2017), Letters from the People (1993) and American Musicians (2001).
In the capstone volume of his epic series The Human Clay, Lee Friedlander (born 1934) has created an ode to people who work. Drawn from his incomparable archive are photographs of individuals laboring on the street and on stage, as well as in the field, in factories and in fluorescent-lit offices. Performers, salespeople and athletes alike are observed both in action and at rest by Friedlander's uncanny eye. Opera singers are caught mid-aria, models primp backstage, mechanics tinker and telemarketers hustle.
Spanning six decades, this humanizing compilation features over 250 photographs, many appearing here for the first time in print.
In this compendium, Lee Friedlander (born 1934) examines the ordinary pickup truck, a quintessentially American mode of transportation. Unadorned in form as well as function, pickups have long been the vehicle of choice for farmers and tradespeople. Their well-worn beds—usually open to the elements, laid bare for all to see—have held and hauled all manner of things, from spare tires and jumbles of wires to animals and the occasional person.
Friedlander, in his witty and encompassing, clear-eyed idiom, has observed this most utilitarian and unapologetically personal object in its native setting: the cacophonous bricolage that is the American social landscape.
Published by RM/Fundación Mapfre. Text by Carlos Gollonet, Nicholas Nixon, Jeffrey Fraenkel, Maria Friedlander, Giancarlo T. Roma.
One of the masters of contemporary photography, Lee Friedlander has dedicated his career to the documentation of everyday life in the United States. His images are characterized by a composition that utilizes the urban geometry of storefronts and street signs—and later car windows and telephone poles—as a framing technique. This catalog, published in conjunction with a retrospective organized by the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid, surveys the wide scope of Friedlander’s career from the 1960s to today. High-quality reproductions of all of the exhibited works are supplemented by text written by curator Carlos Gollonet and photographer Nicholas Nixon.
The volume serves as a comprehensive guide to Friedlander’s body of work, with personal insight provided through an interview between Maria Friedlander and gallery director Jeffrey Fraenkel, as well as a chronology of the artist’s life by his grandson Giancarlo T. Roma.
Lee Friedlander was born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1934, and studied photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. In 1956 he moved to New York City, which quickly became both the setting and subject of the majority of his work. Friedlander was represented alongside Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand in the 1967 New Documents exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, now understood as a landmark event in American documentary photography. Friedlander still lives and works in New York, and is represented by the Fraenkel Gallery.
The saturation of our social landscape by photographs and photographers is apparent from any public point of view. Photography is arguably the most democratic of mediums, even more accessible today across culture and class than language. In some regards, this has been Lee Friedlander’s most enduring subject—the way that average citizens interact with the world by making pictures of it, as well as how those pictures and the pictures constructed for advertising or political purposes define the public space. In Lee Friedlander: The People’s Pictures we see photographs spanning six decades, most of the geographic United States and parts of Western Europe and Asia. These pictures are uniquely Friedlander photographs: as much about what’s in front of the camera as they are about the photographer’s lifelong redefining of the medium. Like his exploration of words, letters and numbers in the social landscape, these photographs of photography’s street presence seem inevitable to Friedlander’s vast visual orchestration of what our society looks like. But make no mistake, Friedlander’s photographs are not objective documents; they are intentional, authored, playful, intelligent creations made through his unprecedented collaboration with time and place. Lee Friedlander (born 1934) has published more than 50 monographs since 1969, and has exhibited extensively around the world for the past five decades, including a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2005. Friedlander lives in New York.
For more than five decades, Lee Friedlander has repeatedly been drawn to the signs that inscribe the American landscape, from hand-lettered ads to storefront windows to massive billboards. Incorporating these markings with precision and sly humor, Friedlander’s photographs record a kind of found poetry of desire and commerce.
Focusing on one of the artist’s key motifs, Lee Friedlander: Signs presents a cacophony of wheat-paste posters, Coca-Cola ads, prices for milk, road signs, stop signs, neon lights, movie marquees and graffiti. The book collects 144 photographs made in New York and other places across the US, and features self-portraits, street photographs and work from series including The American Monument and America by Car, among others. Illegible or plainspoken, crude or whimsical, Friedlander’s signs are an unselfconscious portrait of modern life.
Lee Friedlander (born 1934) began photographing in 1948. Among his many monographs are Sticks and Stones, Self-Portrait, Letters from the People, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan and At Work, among others. His work was included in the influential 1967 exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski. Among the most important living photographers, Friedlander is in the collections of museums around the world.
Richard Benson, William Christenberry, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, John Szarkowski, Garry Winogrand
Published by Eakins Press Foundation. Contributions by Richard Benson, William Christenberry, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, John Szarkowski, Garry Winogrand.
In the 1960s and '70s, Lee Friedlander (born 1934) developed his signature approach to documenting the American “social landscape”: deadpan, structurally complex black-and-white photographs of seemingly anything, anybody or anyplace that passed in front of his lens. But as he was making his name as a documentary photographer capturing the look and feel of modern American life, he was also photographing his closest friends, a practice he has continued throughout his long career.
A slipcased set of six paperback books, The Mind and the Hand presents the photographer’s intimate portraits of six of his best friends taken over the past five decades. The subjects, each presented in their own separate volume, comprise a veritable who's who of one of America's most fertile periods in photography: Richard Benson, William Christenberry, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, John Szarkowski and Garry Winogrand. Each volume begins with a relevant quote from its subject.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Edited with text by Sarah Hermanson Meister. Text by Max Kozloff.
In 1967, The Museum of Modern Art presented New Documents, a landmark exhibition organized by John Szarkowski that brought together a selection of works by three photographers whose individual achievements signaled the artistic potential for the medium in the 1960s and beyond: Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand.
Though largely unknown at the time, these three photographers are now universally acknowledged as artists of singular talent within the history of photography. The exhibition articulated a profound shift in the landscape of 20th-century photography, and interest in the exhibition has only continued to expand. Yet, until now, there has been no publication that captures its content.
Published in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the exhibition, Arbus Friedlander Winogrand features full-page reproductions of the 94 photographs included in the exhibition, along with Szarkowski’s original wall text, press release, installation views and an abundance of archival material. Essays by curator Sarah Hermanson Meister and critic Max Kozloff, who originally reviewed the exhibition for The Nation in 1967, critically situate the exhibition and its reception, and examine its lasting influence on the field of photography.
Sarah Hermanson Meister is Curator of the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Max Kozloff is a New York-based writer and photographer.
Kristen Gaylord is Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow of the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Published by Eakins Press Foundation. Text by Peter Galassi, Leslie George Katz.
Originally published to great acclaim in 1976, The American Monument has become one of the most sought-after photography publications of the twentieth century. Long out of print, with only a rare few available on the secondary market, this second edition makes a treasure available once more to new audiences. Published in the same over-sized format as the first edition—with exquisite reproductions of 213 photographs—the album of post-bound single sheets can easily be temporarily disassembled for display.
Considered by many, including Friedlander himself, to be one of his most important books, The American Monument has influenced generations of photographers. The second edition includes a new essay by eminent photography curator and Friedlander scholar, Peter Galassi, which illuminates the history and continued significance of this publication.
This album by Lee Friedlander is a memorial in photographs to the American monument. The photographs were selected from several thousand negatives and more than a thousand prints the photographer made of the subject during a dozen years while traveling throughout the United States. The curator John Szarkowski stated: “I am still astonished and heartened by the deep affection of those pictures, by the photographer’s tolerant equanimity in the face of the facts, by the generosity of spirit, the freedom from pomposity and rhetoric. One might call this work an act of high artistic patriotism, an achievement that might help us reclaim that word from ideologues and expediters.”
Lee Friedlander is celebrated for his ability to weave disparate elements from ordinary life into uncanny images of great formal complexity and visual wit. And few things have attracted his attention—or been more unpredictable in their effect—than the humble chain link fence.
Erected to delineate space, form protective barriers and bring order to chaos, the fences in Friedlander’s pictures catch filaments of light, throw disconcerting shadows and visually interrupt scenes without fully occluding them. Sometimes the steel mesh seems as delicate as lace; at others it appears as tough as snakeskin. In this book’s 97 pictures, drawn from over four decades of work, it recurs as versatile, utilitarian and ubiquitous—not unlike the photographer himself.
Lee Friedlander was born in 1934 in Aberdeen, Washington. In 1948 he began to photograph seriously and by the 1960s had become widely recognized for his all-encompassing portrayals of the American social landscape—a term he coined. Friedlander’s influential work has been the subject of many seminal exhibitions, including New Documents and Mirrors and Windows, both organized by John Szarkowski at The Museum of Modern Art, and more than 50 books, including Self Portrait (1970), The American Monument (1976), Factory Valleys (1982), Sticks and Stones (2004) and America By Car (2010).
Published by Eakins Press Foundation. Text by Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins.
On May 17, 1957, through the generosity of Bayard Rustin, Lee Friedlander was given full access to photograph the participants of the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in Washington, D.C. This extraordinary event, organized by Mr. Rustin, as well as A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., brought together many of the great thinkers and leaders of the period, and was a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement. Friedlander's photographs depict the famous individuals at the event—Mahalia Jackson, Ruby Dee and Harry Belafonte, among many other luminaries of the African-American community—but they also pay particular attention to the 25,000 men, women and children who gathered to give voice and energy to the ideas embattled by the movement. The 58 previously unpublished photographs gathered here are among Friedlander's earliest work. Also included in this publication is the typescript of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Give Us the Ballot" speech and additional ephemera from the march produced in facsimile.
Lee Friedlander’s exploration of one of photography’s most enduring genres began almost by chance, in the late 1970s, when a teacher colleague at Rice University in Houston lined up a regular schedule of nude models for his students. Almost immediately, Friedlander found that he preferred to photograph the models at their homes, and ingeniously deployed household objects such as bedside lamps, potted plants and sofa fabrics to play off against the angular poses of the models and the emphatic framing of the overall composition. Friedlander’s nudes show every blemish, every contour that makes each body unique, while his flash often serves to counter this realism with a softening effect that often recedes the body’s shadow right up to its outline. With the publication of Friedlander’s nude portraits of Madonna (prints of which fetch huge sums), the series became among the photographer’s best known work, and eventually saw publication in 1991, from Jonathan Cape. Lee Friedlander: The Nudes significantly expands on the Cape edition (itself long out of print), with a total of 84 nudes, plus a new layout and design by Katy Homans and new separations by Thomas Palmer. As such, it offers the most lavish presentation of this key series in Friedlander’s massive oeuvre. Lee Friedlander (born 1934) first came to public attention in the landmark exhibition New Documents, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1967. More than 40 books about his work have been published since the early 1970s, including Self-Portrait, Sticks and Stones, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan, Family, America by Car, People at Work, The New Cars 1964 and Mannequin. His career was the focus of a major traveling retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art in 2005.
Lee Friedlander is one of the few artists in any medium to have sustained a body of influential work over five decades. To make the photographs in Mannequin, he returned to the hand-held, 35-mm camera that he used in the earliest decades of his career. Over the past three years, Friedlander has roamed the sidewalks of New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco, focusing on storefront windows and reflections that conjure marketplace notions of sex, fashion and consumerism, while recalling Atget’s surreal photographs of Parisian windows made 100 years earlier. Thoroughly straightforward, their unsettling and radical new compositions suggest photographs that have been torn up and pasted back together again in near-random ways.
Lee Friedlander (born 1934) first came to public attention in the landmark exhibition New Documents, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1967. The range of his work since then—including portraits, nudes, still lifes and studies of people at work—is anchored in a uniquely vivid and far-reaching vision of the american scene. More than 40 books about his work have been published since the early 1970s, including Self-Portrait, Sticks and Stones, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan, Family, America by Car, People at Work and The New Cars 1964. His career was the focus of a major traveling retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art in 2005. His work can be found in depth in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art, among many others.
PUBLISHER Fraenkel Gallery
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 9 x 13 in. / 112 pgs / 103 duotone.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 7/31/2012 Active
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2012 p. 22
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781881337324TRADE List Price: $49.95 CAD $67.50 GBP £44.99
AVAILABILITY Out of stock
STATUS: Out of stock
Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.
Published by Fraenkel Gallery. Introduction by Jeffrey Fraenkel.
In 1964, two young art directors at Harper's Bazaar named Ruth Ansel and Bea Feitler hired the then up-and-coming photographer Lee Friedlander to photograph the much-anticipated new car models of that year. Friedlander's jazz album covers had proven he knew how to work on assignment, and Ansel and Feitler realized that if Bazaarwas to obtain the photographer's best work he should be let alone to make it. It's difficult now to comprehend how anticipated next year's cars were to Americans of the 1960s, but if Friedlander was aware of this, the photographs he delivered (on time) don't betray it. Rather than depicting the cars in seductive locales, he had them delivered to parking lots near burger joints, cheap furniture stores, downscale beauty parlors and--most ignominiously of all--a used-car lot. As Friedlander says, “I just put the cars out in the world, instead of on a pedestal.” The magazine's editor-in-chief was unamused, fearing that the photographs would deter car manufacturers from advertising in Harper's, so Friedlander was paid for his work and the photographs were soon forgotten--until he stumbled across them in 2010. Even a cursory study of this project reveals a compendium of strategies that would soon bring Friedlander acclaim and wreak havoc with widely accepted notions of what constituted a good photograph. Now, the Continentals, Eldorados and Mercury Meteors of 1964 have their day in this beautifully produced volume.
PUBLISHER Fraenkel Gallery
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 12 x 9.75 in. / 72 pgs / 3 color / 33 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 9/30/2011 Out of stock indefinitely
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2011 p. 177
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781881337317TRADE List Price: $49.95 CAD $67.50 GBP £44.99
Published by Mary Boone Gallery. Text by Klaus Kertess.
Shot in locations such as Glen Canyon, Death Valley and the Mojave Desert, the black-and-white photographs in this handsomely produced volume locate tangles of foreground brush, craggy mountainscape walls and snowy landscapes festooned with leaves. Friedlander's photographs often suit large-format publication, and this 12 x 12.75-inch monograph, with its linen binding and tipped-on cover image, amply houses their magnificent sense of austere scale and intense detail. In his foreword to the volume, Klaus Kertess writes: "The heterogeneous organic mesh so often experienced in the foreground of these landscapes imbue forests and mountains with a kind of intimacy and immediacy ordinarily reserved for those actually trekking through the photographed terrain... The muffled silence of the snowbound landscape, the fragile delicacy of the leaves, and the trees almost dissolving in the misty atmosphere envelop the plane in lyrical reverie seldom equaled in painting or photography."
PUBLISHER Mary Boone Gallery
BOOK FORMAT Clth, 12 x 12.75 in. / 30 pgs / 25 duotone / limited edition of 600 copies.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 8/31/2011 Out of stock indefinitely
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2011 p. 124
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780980171532TRADE List Price: $125.00 CAD $150.00
Enduring icons of American culture, the car and the highway remain vital as auguries of adventure and discovery, and a means by which to take in the country's vast scale. Lee Friedlander is the first photographer to make the car an actual "form" for making photographs. Driving across most of the country's 50 states in an ordinary rental car, Friedlander applied the brilliantly simple conceit of deploying the sideview mirror, rearview mirror, the windshield and the side windows as a picture frame within which to record the country's eccentricities and obsessions at the turn of the century. This method allows for fascinating effects in foreshortening, and wonderfully telling juxtapositions in which steering wheels, dashboards and leatherette bump up against roadside bars, motels, churches, monuments, suspension bridges, landscapes and often Friedlander's own image, via sideview mirror shots. Presented in the square crop format that has dominated his look in recent series, and taken over the past decade, the nearly 200 images in America by Car are easily among Friedlander's finest, full of virtuoso touch and clarity, while also revisiting themes from older bodies of work (Friedlander occasionally used aspects of automotive architecture in photographs from the late 1960s and early 1970s). Never has America been photographed so penetratingly and ingeniously as in Friedlander's latest body of work. This edition of America by Car is limited to 1000 copies and is signed by Friedlander.
Enduring icons of American culture, the car and the highway remain vital as auguries of adventure and discovery, and a means by which to take in the country's vast scale. Lee Friedlander is the first photographer to make the car an actual "form" for making photographs. Driving across most of the country's 50 states in an ordinary rental car, Friedlander applied the brilliantly simple conceit of deploying the sideview mirror, rearview mirror, the windshield and the side windows as a picture frame within which to record the country's eccentricities and obsessions at the turn of the century. This method allows for fascinating effects in foreshortening, and wonderfully telling juxtapositions in which steering wheels, dashboards and leatherette bump up against roadside bars, motels, churches, monuments, suspension bridges, landscapes and often Friedlander's own image, via sideview mirror shots. Presented in the square crop format that has dominated his look in recent series, and taken over the past decade, the nearly 200 images in America by Car are easily among Friedlander's finest, full of virtuoso touch and clarity, while also revisiting themes from older bodies of work (Friedlander occasionally used aspects of automotive architecture in photographs from the late 1960s and early 1970s). Never has America been photographed so penetratingly and ingeniously as in Friedlander's latest body of work.
PUBLISHER
BOOK FORMAT Clth, 9.5 x 9.5 in. / 200 pgs / 190 duotone.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 7/31/2010 Out of stock indefinitely
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2010 p. 177
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781935202073TRADE List Price: $49.95 CAD $67.50 GBP £44.99
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Text by Peter Galassi. Afterword by Richard Benson.
Writing about The Museum of Modern Art, New York's monumental and critically acclaimed 2005 Lee Friedlander retrospective, Richard Lacayo of Time magazine said: "If a sophisticated notion of what a picture can look like, the continuous construction of new avenues of feeling, and sheer, sustained inventiveness are the measures we go by, then Friedlander is one of the most important American artists of any kind since World War II… Friedlander loves the muchness of the world. He loves the haphazard multitude of things that can pop up in every picture--street signs, sunbeams, bits of roofline, a jagged shadow--all colliding and contradicting one another. In his breezy but very acute introduction to the show's catalogue, Peter Galassi, MoMA's Chief Curator of Photography, gets it just right when he says some of Friedlander's pictures give you the impression that 'the physical world had been broken into fragments and reconstituted under pressure at three times its original density.'" Now available for the first time--the paperback edition of this definitive, comprehensive volume is being published to coincide with the traveling retrospective's stop in San Francisco at SFMOMA. At 480 pages, Friedlander includes more than 750 photographs--770 duotone and 33 color--grouped by series, as well as the incisive, aforementioned essay by Peter Galassi and an afterword by Richard Benson.
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers. Text by Lee Friedlander.
A natural chronicler of all things uniquely American, photographer Lee Friedlander here puts his lens to the work of Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), designer of many of this country's most iconic public landscapes and the father of North American landscape architecture. Olmsted was responsible for a staggering number of America's greatest parks, including the Niagara reservation (North America's oldest state park), Washington Park, the Biltmore Estate, the U.S. Capitol building landscape and entire parkway systems in Buffalo and Louisville. His most famous work remains New York City's Central Park, a pioneering egalitarian gesture that, at the time, was very unusual for its ready accessibility. This book, published to coincide with The Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2008 exhibition, compiles 89 photographs made by Friedlander in Olmsted's public parks and private estates. This stunning collection of rich tritones celebrates the complex, idiosyncratic picture-making of one of the country's greatest living photographers, and also arrives upon the 150 year anniversary of Olmsted's 1858 design for Central Park. Rambling across bridges and through open meadows and dense undergrowth, Friedlander locates a pure pleasure in Olmsted's designs--in the meticulous stonework, the balance of exposure to shade and in the mature, weather-beaten trees that attest to the durability of Olmsted's vision.
I first went to Japan in 1977 and found the whole country ablaze with blossom. I went again in 1979, 1981 and 1984, always at cherry-blossom time. As far as I knew, Japan was always abloom. So says the legendary American photographer Lee Friedlander, whose newest publication presents, for the first time, the complete set of 73 images that the artist made during his four trips to Japan. The groundbreaking black-and-white images--first seen as 25 photogravures in a 1986 portfolio, and long out of print--appear as examples of radical picture-making even 20 years later. Few serious photographers would have dared to photograph cherry blossoms with anything other than color film. The result is a new kind of beauty, with many of the compositions bordering on visual chaos. The images collected here serve as a precursor for much of Friedlander's late landscape work, which was exhibited to great acclaim in his 2005 Museum of Modern Art retrospective. Printed by the laborious dry-trap process, the amazingly sensuous reproductions closely approximate the original prints. This book was produced entirely in collaboration with the artist.
Published by Fraenkel Gallery/Hasselblad Foundation. Photographs by Lee Friedlander.
The master photographer best known for his extensive, insightful documentation of "the American social landscape"--from jazz musicians to factory hands to New York pedestrians and office workers zoning out at their keyboards--has recently been spending more time looking at the literal, natural landscape. His monumental 2005 MoMA retrospective showed, for the first time, a new series of landscapes made in the American West, while for Olives and Apples, he has looked back over the last decade's work and culled a forest, tree by tree. His docile subjects, apple trees photographed in New York State and olive trees photographed in France, Italy and Spain from 1997-2004, are presented in circumstances ranging from sunny, leafy summer health to glittering winter ice-storm glory. Some of the most striking compositions are shot from just inside the reach of a tree's furthest twigs, so that expanding branching limbs fill the frame, stretching out around the viewer.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Afterword by John Szarkowski.
Lee Friedlander's surreal sensibility is on full display in this set of photographs, originally published in 1970. Here Friedlander focuses on the role of his own physical presence in his images. He writes: “At first, my presence in my photos was fascinating and disturbing. But as time passed and I was more a part of other ideas in my photos, I was able to add a giggle to those feelings.” Here readers can witness this progression as Friedlander appears in the form of his shadow, or reflected in windows and mirrors, and only occasionally fully visible through his own camera. In some photos he visibly struggles with the notion of self-portraiture, desultorily shooting himself in household mirrors and other reflective surfaces. Soon, though, he begins to toy with the pictures, almost teasingly inserting his shadow into them to amusing and provocative effect--elongated and trailing a group of women seen only from the knees down; cast and bent over a chair as if seated in it; mirroring the silhouette of someone walking down the street ahead of him; or falling on the desert ground, a large bush standing in for hair. These uncanny self-portraits evoke a surprisingly full landscape of the artist's life and mind. This reprint edition of Lee Friedlander: Self Portrait contains nearly 50 duotone images and an afterword by John Szarkowski, former Director of the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Essay by Peter Galassi. Afterword by Richard Benson.
Lee Friedlander is one of the most important of the 1960s generation of photographers for whom the posture of disinterested objectivity served as a vehicle for passionate personal inquiries. His large body of work--he most often produces extended series of pictures on a chosen theme, then publishes them in book form--is broad in subject matter and supple and complex in style, and focuses on what he calls America's “social landscape.” At the same time, he has pursued a playful dialogue with artistic tradition--as though open-eyed curiosity about the world, and a sophisticated taste for the wiles of picture-making were one and the same thing. Lee Friedlander takes a deep critical look at Friedlander's abundantly productive career. Including over 500 photographs grouped by series, and an incisive essay by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, this oversized publication is the most comprehensive review of the photographer's career to date.
Published by D.A.P./Fraenkel Gallery. Essays by James Enyeart.
In Sticks & Stones, Lee Friedlander offers his view of America as seen through its architecture. In 192 square-format pictures shot over the past 15 years, Friedlander has framed the familiar through his own unique way of seeing the world. Whether he's representing modest vernacular buildings or monumental skyscrapers, Friedlander liberates them from our preconceived notions and gives us a new way of looking at our surrounding environment. Shot during the course of countless trips to urban and rural areas across the country, many of them made by car (the driver's window sometimes providing Friedlander with an extra frame), these pictures capture an America as unblemished by romanticized notions of human nature as it is full of quirky human touches. Nevertheless, man's presence is not at stake here; streets, roads, façades and buildings offer their own visual intrigue, without reference to their makers. And in the end, it is not even the grand buildings themselves that prick our interest, but rather the forgettable architectural elements--the poles, posts, sidewalks, fences, phone booths, alleys, parked cars--that through photographic juxtaposition with all kinds of buildings help us to discover the spirit of an Architectural America.
PUBLISHER
BOOK FORMAT Clothbound, 11.75 x 12.75 in. / 216 pgs / 192 duotone.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 10/2/2004 Out of stock indefinitely
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2004
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781891024979TRADE List Price: $85.00 CAD $112.50 GBP £75.00
Published by Fraenkel Gallery. Foreword by Maria Friedlander.
Like most fathers, Lee Friedlander has made photographs of his wife and children throughout their lives together. Unlike most fathers, Friedlander happens to be one of the greatest living photographers. In Family, Friedlander departs from his well-known terrain of the open road and the city street, focusing instead on his wife, Maria, his children and (later) his grandchildren. The result is an intimate narrative of a family's complex life, from 1958 to the present. The subjects are natural and unaffected in front of the ever-present lens, and the pictures make it clear that Friedlander's camera was a constant presence in the home, a natural extension of the artist himself. Over and over Friedlander recognized in an instant things that were precious and universal, yet specific to his own situation. Friedlander has done us a great honor by publishing these images. The inventive design of Family enhances the integrity of Friedlander's family album.
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers. Photographs by Lee Friedlander.
In 1994, suffering from aching knees and painfully concerned about it, Lee Friedlander decided to prepare himself for a sedentary life. He began to pursue the still life as a possibility and maybe a way of photographic life--a dramatic shift for a man who has spent his life photographing on the street, in the woods, on the road, at parties, anywhere but sitting down. He tried a variety of subjects with a few good results, but nothing stood out until he began to look at the fresh flowers that his wife Maria placed around their home in cut-glass vases. But never mind the flowers. True to Friedlander's style, he very quickly found himself most interested in the stems. During the months of February, May, June and December of 1994, he focused his lens on wild arrays of stems and the optical splendor produced by light refracting through the glass vases that contained them. In 1998, Friedlander had both of his knees surgically replaced. Three months of recovery time passed during which he took no pictures, the only gap in almost 50 years of working. The next year, successfully rehabilitated and walking without pain, Friedlander decided to re-apply himself to the stems and finish them off as a subject. Published in a lush, oversize volume, printed with a special dry trap process, Stems is the result of this unusual saga in the photographer's career. Lee Friedlander and his camera have now returned to the street.
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers. Essay by Richard Benson.
In the Industrial North at the end of the 1970s, people were at work with hands and machinery to make things we all use. In the mid 80s, in Wisconsin, they built supercomputers; at the same time, near Boston, they typed on desktop computers. In New York City, in the early 90s, people stood on stock floors, trading. In 1995, in Omaha, they sat at computers, cold calling as telemarketers; and in Cleveland, in that same year, they used their human skills in traditional ways to once again craft products we all depend on. Work, work, work--we spend the better part of our lives on the job, be it in a factory or an antiseptic office, or somewhere else in the vast assembly line in between. Tireless photographer Lee Friedlander, the maniacally inclusive but blessedly nonchalant cataloguer of Americana--her monuments, jazz musicians and urban landscapes--here presents 16 years of Americans at work. A collection of commissioned portfolios, some made at the request of art institutions, others at the behest of company CEOs, Lee Friedlander At Work also documents, albeit subtly, 16 years of one of America's most exceptional and hard-working photographers at work.
Published by Fraenkel Gallery. Introduction by Maria Friedlander. Afterword by R.B. Kitaj.
An intimate friendship of more than three decades is chronicled here, along with the aesthetic evolution of two major American artists. R.B. Kitaj's unusual, handsome, troubled, charismatic face has been a rich subject for Lee Friedlander's camera since the two artists became friends in 1970, when both were teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles. Kitaj begins and ends with photographs shot in Los Angeles, and the artist's passage from raw and vigorous young man to grizzly, white-haired prophet is charted through more than 90 images. A frank and moving series of images from 1994, focused on Kitaj during the days following his wife Sandra's sudden and unexpected death, achieve a disarming intimacy that could only have been the result of a deep and trusting friendship. Kitaj includes a reminiscence by Kitaj himself as well as an introduction by Friedlander's wife, Maria.
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers. Foreword by Joel Dorn.Interviews with Ruth Brown and Steve Lacy.
Limited copies of the now out-of-print hardcover edition signed by Lee Friedlander.
In the 1950s Lee Friedlander arrived in New York and began work as a house photographer for Atlantic Records. Over the next two decades, he would create some of their most famous album covers, and his picture style -- including portraits of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Ruth Brown, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and countless others -- became forever associated with that golden era of American music. This book is Friedlander's tribute to the great musicians of the post-war years. It includes work from his trips through the Deep South, where he met Delta Blues musicians like Mississippi Fred McDowell, New Orleans marching bands and Nashville performers such as Johnny Cash, the Carter Sisters and Flatt & Scruggs. There are photographs of unknown bluegrass guitarists in Appalachia, photographs from tours with Count Bassie's Orchestra, and images of Jazz geniuses like Thelonius Monk, Duke Ellington, Ornette Coleman and Yusef Lateef. Interviews by Friedlander with R&B legend Ruth Brown and modern jazz pioneer Steve Lacy are included along with an introduction by music impresario Joel Dorn.
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers. Foreword by Joel Dorn.Interviews with Ruth Brown and Steve Lacy.
In the 1950s Lee Friedlander arrived in New York and began work as a house photographer for Atlantic Records. Over the next two decades, he would create some of their most famous album covers, and his picture style--including portraits of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Ruth Brown, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and countless others--became forever associated with that golden era of American music. This book is Friedlander's tribute to the great musicians of the post-war years. It includes work from his trips through the Deep South, where he met Delta Blues musicians like Mississippi Fred McDowell, New Orleans marching bands and Nashville performers such as Johnny Cash, the Carter Sisters and Flatt & Scruggs. There are photographs of unknown bluegrass guitarists in Appalachia, photographs from tours with Count Basie's Orchestra, and images of Jazz geniuses like Thelonius Monk, Duke Ellington, Ornette Coleman and Yusef Lateef. Interviews by Friedlander with R&B legend Ruth Brown and modern jazz pioneer Steve Lacy are included along with an introduction by music impresario Joel Dorn.
Published by Fraenkel Gallery. Foreword by Walker Evans.
The Little Screens is a revered and influential body of early work by Lee Friedlander, but it has never before been brought together in its entirety. The book's title refers to the television screens housed in motel rooms and other nondescript rooms of anonymous character spread throughout the country during the 1960s. Each screen vividly transmits images of popular culture icons, political figures, or minor celebrities of the times. The environments are iconographic ghost-rooms filled with bland furniture-rooms without personality, rooms that could be, and are, anywhere and everywhere. The Little Screens and their environments weave a narrative of a peripatetic photographer moving through the landscape of 1960s America, and the melancholy, yet sometimes comic quality of life lived on the road. They provide a look at the 1960s as so many people saw it: beamed into their televisions and flickering across their living rooms. The book's preface was written by the legendary Walker Evans after he saw the photographs in 1963.
PUBLISHER Fraenkel Gallery
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 9.5 x 9.5 in. / 96 pgs / 34 duotone
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 9/2/2001 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2001
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781881337119TRADE List Price: $45.00 CAD $55.00
Published by D.A.P./Fraenkel Gallery. Photographs by Lee Friedlander.
Originally published in 1970, this understated gem of a book introduces Friedlander's self-conscious posture. The original edition has become a collector's item, and now D.A.P. brings it back into print as a hardcover.
Published by D.A.P./Fraenkel Gallery. Photographs by Lee Friedlander. Text by John Szarkowski.
Originally published in 1970, this understated gem of a book introduces Friedlander's self-conscious posture. The original edition has become a collector's item, and now D.A.P. brings it back into print as a Hardcover.
PUBLISHER D.A.P./Fraenkel Gallery
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 10 x 9.5 in. / 96 pgs / 49 duotone
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 5/2/1998 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 1998
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781881616962TRADE List Price: $35.00 CAD $40.00
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers. Photographs by Lee Friedlander. Contributions by Ruth Brown, Steve Lacy, Joel Dorn.
In the 1950s Lee Friedlander arrived in New York and began work as a house photographer for Atlantic Records. Over the next two decades, he would create some of their most famous album covers, and his picture style--including portraits of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Ruth Brown, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and countless others--became forever associated with that golden era of American music. This book is Friedlander's tribute to the great musicians of the post-war years. It includes work from his trips through the Deep South, where he met Delta Blues musicians like Mississippi Fred McDowell, New Orleans marching bands and Nashville performers such as Johnny Cash, the Carter Sisters and Flatt & Scruggs. There are photographs of unknown bluegrass guitarists in Appalachia, photographs from tours with Count Basie's Orchestra, and images of Jazz geniuses like Thelonius Monk, Duke Ellington, Ornette Coleman and Yusef Lateef. Interviews by Friedlander with R&B legend Ruth Brown and modern jazz pioneer Steve Lacy are included along with an introduction by music impresario Joel Dorn. "...an irresistible appeal... a new and exciting understanding of Friedlander, one of our most important contemporary photographers."--Andy Grundberg, The New York Times Book Review. "This informail but vast [book] -- 514 images! -- may be the best look yet at a half century of American music... Few labors of loves ever paid off so handsomely."--Malcolm Jones, Jr., Newsweek. "The sheer breadth of American Musicicians puts it in a class by itself."--Jason Berry, Chicago Tribune.
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers. Photographs by Lee Friedlander.
This volume is photographer Lee Friedlander's tribute to the extraordinary landscape of the American Southwest, an incomparable record of the Sonoran Desert's timeless beauty.
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers. Photographs by Lee Friedlander.
A classic book by master photographer Lee Friedlander. "... a wonderful lesson in the art of looking closely.... Friedlander has produced a photographic essay that testifies... to his virtuosity." -- Newsweek