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Lee Friedlander
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Name
Lee Friedlander
Role
Photographer
Education
Art Center College of Design (1953–1955)
Artwork
Route 9W, New York, Wilmington, Delaware
Movies
Girl Play, Out at the Wedding, Wasabi Tuna, Girls on Film 2
Children
Erik Friedlander, Anna Friedlander
Books
Letters from the people, American musicians, The desert seen, Factory valleys, Lee Friedlander: Photogra
Similar People
Garry Winogrand, Erik Friedlander, Gina DeVivo, Angela Robinson, Jamie Blake
Lee friedlander photography the big dream david lynch
Lee Friedlander (born July 14, 1934) is an American photographer and artist. In the 1960s and 1970s Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban "social landscape," with many of his photographs including fragments of store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and street signs.
Audio in sight art critic andy grundberg discusses lee friedlander
Life and work
Friedlander was born in Aberdeen, Washington, and studied photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. In 1956, he moved to New York City where he photographed jazz musicians for record covers. His early work was influenced by Eugène Atget, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans. In 1960 Friedlander was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to focus on his art, and was awarded subsequent grants in 1962 and 1977. Some of his most famous photographs appeared in the September 1985 Playboy, black and white nude photographs of Madonna from the late 1970s. A student at the time, she was paid only $25 for her 1979 set. In 2009, one of the images fetched $37,500 at a Christie's Art House auction.
Working primarily with Leica hand-held 35 mm cameras and black-and-white film, Friedlander's style focused on the "social landscape". His photographs used detached images of urban life, store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, and posters and signs all combining to capture the look of modern life.
In 1963, Nathan Lyons, Assistant Director and Curator of Photography at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House mounted Friedlander's first solo exhibition. Friedlander was then a key figure in curator John Szarkowski's 1967 "New Documents" exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York along with Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus. In 1973, his work was honored at the Rencontres d'Arles festival in France with the screening "Soirée américaine : Judy Dater, Jack Welpott, Jerry Uelsmann, Lee Friedlander" presented by Jean-Claude Lemagny. In 1990, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Friedlander a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2005, the Museum of Modern Art presented a major retrospective of Friedlander's career, including nearly 400 photographs from the 1950s to the present; it was presented again in 2008 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
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. These images display textures which were not a feature of his earlier work. In this sense, the images are similar to those of Josef Sudek who also photographed the confines of his home and studio.
Friedlander began photographing parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted for a six-year commission from the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal beginning in 1988. After completing the commission he continued to photograph Olmsted parks, for twenty years in total. His series includes New York City's Central Park; Brooklyn's Prospect Park; Manhattan's Morningside Park; World's End in Hingham, Massachusetts; Cherokee Park in Louisville, Kentucky; and Niagara Falls State Park. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the design for Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art held an exhibition of Friedlander's photographs of that park and a book was published, Photographs: Frederick Law Olmsted Landscapes.
It has been claimed that Friedlander is "notoriously media shy".
He now works primarily with medium format cameras such as the Hasselblad Superwide.
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.
New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005. ISBN 0-87070-338-2. With a preface by Friedlander and an afterword by John Szarkowski, "The Friedlander Self". According to the colophon, "This third edition retains the new material of the 1998 edition except in its design, which returns to that of the original book."
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.
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.
2008: America By Car, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
2008: Lee Friedlander: A Ramble in Olmsted Parks,Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 22 January – 11 May 2008. Organised by Jeff L. Rosenheim.
2010: America By Car, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Selected group exhibitions
1966: Toward a Social Landscape, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY. Photographs by Friedlander, Bruce Davidson, Danny Lyon, Duane Michals, and Garry Winogrand. Curated by Nathan Lyons.
1967: New Documents, Museum of Modern Art, New York. With Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus, curated by John Szarkowski.