CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/11/2023

"Unlike anything ever played before." Joel Coen's take on Lee Friedlander

“New York City” (1969) is reproduced from Lee Friedlander Framed by Joel Coen, in which the acclaimed filmmaker applies his renowned editing skills and sense of play to the selection of 70 personally intriguing photographs by the legendary American photographer of the social landscape. "I found it a daunting task to choose just a few images from Lee Friedlander’s vast career," Coen writes. "Where to start? As a picture maker myself I was drawn more to his beautifully strange sense of composition than to any specific subject. And 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. I was also interested in the fact that Lee is a jazz enthusiast, and that he began his career by making pictures of musicians. If all art aspires to the condition of music, then Lee is a jazzman with a camera, and the sound he gets out of his instrument is unlike anything ever played before."