CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/30/2018

What is inside, what is out? Lee Friedlander: Chain Link

Question: Is it possible to make a great book of photographs shot through or around chain link fences? Answer: Yes—if you’re Lee Friedlander, and your publisher is Steidl. Whether he’s capturing a rolling billboard for a 24-hour “Hot Babes” escort service, a little girl in a trailer park, a life-sized religious diorama, two rhinos mating in the zoo, or his own shadow behind the diagonal grey grid of the world’s most ubiquitous industrial fencing material, American master Lee Friedlander yet again manages to present a true portrait of us, to us. What is inside, what is out, his work seems to ask. What is forbidden to us? Who owns, who belongs, who must be kept out?