Tag: Lee Friedlander

Lee Friedlander’s Intimate Portraits of His Wife, Through Sixty Years of Marriage

Friedlander’s style of photography is usually cool, winking, and gamesman-like, but his pictures of his wife thrum with gentle affection.

Lee Friedlander once slyly assessed his promiscuous eye by saying, “I tend to photograph the things that get in front of my camera.” For Friedlander, this was in part a kind of formalist credo: his most innovative photographs are elegant spatial muddles, frames so stuffed to the gills that one imagines his hidebound camera-club contemporaries clutching their manuals in horror. But it was also, of course, an emphatic statement of fact. Like many of the pioneering American photographers of the middle twentieth century, Friedlander’s life in pictures meant pounding the pavement, and piling Kerouacian miles on his odometer in between. Now eighty-four years old, he once said that the longest he’s gone without shooting was the three months it took him to recover from a double knee replacement, in 1998. But the things that got in front of Friedlander's camera weren’t always out in the wilds of the street. Sometimes, the consummate peripatetic photographed within the quieter confines of his home.

Viewing the World Through Lee Friedlander’s Chain-Link Fences

The photographer’s new collection bends a ubiquitous, mass-produced object to frame a portrait of American culture.

Like much of Lee Friedlander’s work, the ninety-seven photographs in his new collection, “Chain Link,” explore broad themes—sex, family, religion, race, nature—with striking wit. Friedlander has released previous series focussing on television screens, on the stems of flowers, and on the backs of heads, and his new book is similarly single-minded. In this series, which is made up of photographs shot over the course of around fifty years, the world is seen through the gray diamonds of chain-link fences. Using this zigzagging thread, Friedlander ties together scenes in distant cities and decades, and bends a ubiquitous, mass-produced object to frame a portrait of American culture.

How Lee Friedlander Edits His Photo Books | PDNPulse

Lee Friedlander has published 50 books in his career to date. And he’s not stopping. The legendary photographer (born 1933) and his grandson, Giancarlo T. Roma, recently revived Haywire Press, the self-publishing company Friedlander established in the 197

Friedlander said he typically Xeroxes his photos, then uses a hole-punch to put three holes on the left and right side of the images. That way, he said, when he puts them into a three-ring binder to see how they work in sequence, he can also easily switch the order, moving them from the left side to the right and back again as he wishes. When he thinks a book is done, he said, he’ll take a second look and almost always decide that two images facing each other have to be swapped.

Lee Friedlander's Photos of 1960s T.V. Sets

Lee Friedlander’s series “The Little Screens” was an early artistic attempt to document television’s nascent dominance of America.

As such, it is disconcerting to see the installation of Lee Friedlander’s prescient “The Little Screens” on the wall at Pier 24 in San Francisco, as 50 pictures are featured in “The Grain of the Present,” the current exhibition curated by Pier 24’s director, Christopher McCall. It’s interesting to view “The Little Screens” as the first artistic attempt to document television’s nascent dominance of America. The pictures were first shot in the early ’60s, when “Bonanza” and “Gunsmoke” were must-see T.V., and John F. Kennedy was president.

Lee Friedlander’s Overlooked Civil Rights Photos – The New York Times

The photographs in Lee Friedlander’s book “Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom” are of a subject not usually associated with him: the civil rights movement. Among his earliest and least typical images — the photographer was only 22 when he made them — they document a historic, if lesser known, event in the struggle for racial equality and justice.

Lee Jumps The Shark

For fans of Lee Friedlander, his recent book Mannequin offers good news and bad. The good news is that the master has returned to the 35 m...

For fans of Lee Friedlander, his recent book Mannequin offers good news and bad. The good news is that the master has returned to the 35 mm format with which he established his reputation during the first half of a sterling career. The bad news is that he appears sorely out of practice. I'm not sure what's going on

'Like a One Eyed Cat', Lee Friedlander - Out of the Cool

Haverstraw, New York, 1966 Friedlander is a photographer, never forget. Although a major photographic artist, he is not an ‘artist utilising photography.’ He uses the camera, that unthinking machine, to transcribe his visual perceptions of the world.

The second essay I ever wrote upon the subject of photography was about the work of Lee Friedlander, on the occasion of an exhibition of his pictures at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, in 1976.2 Now, some fifteen years later, a much larger retrospective, Like a One-Eyed Cat, arrives at the Victoria and Albert Museum, having the benefit of much fine work completed in the interim, and accompanied by the most extensive monograph on the photographer to date.3 And published almost concurrently is the eagerly awaited volume of his remarkable and controversial studies of the female nude.4

Lee Friedlander: "Just Look At It" (2005)

By Rod Slemmons Lee Friedlander was born in the logging mill town of Aberdeen, Washington in 1934. He began photographing in 1948 because of a "fascination with the equipment," in his words. His first paid job was a Christmas card photograph of a dog f

It has become increasingly difficult to see photographs as the visible world has been almost completely plastered over with lenticular representations of itself. Strangely, as the photograph becomes the world, it disappears -- or perhaps more accurately, it loses its informative opacity

5B4: Lee Friedlander Photographs Frederick Law Olmsted Landscapes

This project in particular is interesting because it came at a time when Lee was experimenting with different camera formats and frame ratios. Within the span of the 89 images in Frederick Law Olmsted Landscapes he shifts from his Leica, to a Noblex pivoting lens panoramic camera, to his Hasselblad Superwide, and the results are noticeable beyond the obvious frame shape.

Check it out here.

Blush, Sweat and Tears

NYT Magazine:

Since the 70’s, Lee Friedlander has been intermittently documenting Americans at work: employees in a Cleveland steel mill, telemarketers in an Omaha calling center, M.I.T. technicians staring into their computer monitors. A few weeks ago, Friedlander encountered some very different production values when he turned his eye to the glamour factory otherwise known as New York fashion week.

Here.