
Lee Friedlander
American Photographer
Movement: Documentary Photography
Born: July 14, 1934 - Aberdeen, Washington

Important Art by Lee FriedlanderThe below artworks are the most important by Lee Friedlander - that both overview the major creative periods, and highlight the greatest achievements by the artist. | |
![]() Artwork Images | Nashville (1963)Artwork description & Analysis: Nashville is drawn from Friedlander's early series Little Screens. Six images from the series appeared in a 1963 Harper's Bazaar photo-essay. This image captures a portion of a room, likely a motel room, illuminated by a television. The only human figure depicted is on the screen, a televisual portrait in extreme close-up with the woman's eyebrows pushing against the upper edge of the frame. Friedlander's presence is implied by a man's dress shirt hanging from the bathroom or closet door. Walker Evans had introduced the Little Screens series as "deft, witty, spanking little poems of hate" which encourages the spectator to read the image as a comment of the rise of television, though the precise nature of any social critique remains somewhat ambiguous. However, just as photography would unsettle painting's supremacy in the art academies, so too television, art film, and video art would question the limits of still photography. In this sense, Friedlander's scrutiny of the proliferation of television screens seems somewhat prescient. Gelatin silver print - The Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection |
![]() Artwork Images | Self Portrait, Provincetown, Massachusetts (1968)Artwork description & Analysis: From his earliest days, Friedlander has approached the self-portrait in a raw and unorthodox manner. Here for instance, he confuses the hierarchy within the frame by positioning an illuminated light bulb between himself and the onlooking spectator. As with most of his self-portraits, Friedlander's presence is either secondary or compromised by other elements in the image. Historian and curator Rod Slemmons suggested that Friedlander "provides us with a new visual world in which obstruction, confusion, and accident are the driving forces" and when the spectator is challenged in this way, she or he is given license to draw their own conclusions from the picture. It is often said of photographers that they 'paint with light' and here the photographic artist is caught between the two light sources - artificial and natural (the latter pours in through the window to Friedlander's left) - by which he 'paints' his pictures: a self-portrait, in other words, reminiscent of the painter and his palette. Gelatin silver print - The Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection |
![]() Artwork Images | Maria, Las Vegas (1970)Artwork description & Analysis: One of Friedlander's favorite subjects is his wife and muse Maria. At first glance, Maria appears to conform to the adoring 'sitter' convention one has come to associate with classical portraiture. However, on closer inspection we notice that Maria is in fact framed within a frame, sharing the inner frame indeed with her silhouetted husband. The picture does avoid his more complex and evasive framing tendencies, yet Friedlander's secondary presence manages to upset the equilibrium of the scene since it serves to remind us that Maria's returning gaze is meant first and foremost for her husband. Putting that detail to one side, Maria is posed in medium close shot, illuminated by the rectangular shards of light that pass through a horizontal (venetian) window blind. Friedlander brings then a chiaroscuro effect to a set up that bears a resemblance to a still from a 1940s film noir. This portrait was to feature in Maria, a collection of images of his wife, sometimes seen with other family members, shot between 1960 and 1992 (the year of the books first publication). The book featured a conversation with Friedlander which he brought to a close with an epigraph to Maria borrowed from Patrick White's novel The Tree of Man (1955): Gelatin silver print |
![]() Artwork Images | New Orleans (1970)Artwork description & Analysis: Given the time and place to which it belongs (1970 New Orleans), we are able to locate quite specific meanings in an image that sits squarely within Friedlander's 'social American landscape' cycle. Though major civil rights victories had been won - notably 1964's Civil Rights Act and 1965's Voting Rights Act - more indirect forms of segregation endured well into the 1970s. Yet New Orleans is by no means a straightforward political 'statement'. Rather, it demonstrates Friedlander's talent for transforming seemingly inconsequential subject matter into more puzzling, more nuanced, narratives. Gelatin silver print |
![]() Artwork Images | Father Duffy. Times Square, New York City (1974)Artwork description & Analysis: Friedlander's photographs are celebrated for their ability to captivate and beguile the spectator. His images are elusive and as such his photography functions on its own terms as a system of signs for which one constructs her or his own meanings. Nowhere is this facet of his work more evident than in Father Duffy. Indeed, this image, which adorned the cover of the exhibition catalog for his 2005 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, stands out as one of Friedlander's signature photographs. Gelatin silver print - Museum of Modern Art Collection |
![]() Artwork Images | Shadow, New York City (1966)Artwork description & Analysis: In another of his iconic images, Friedlander exploits a common photographic 'mistake' by allowing his shadow to encroach on his frame. Though this technique was not unheard of - Eudora Welty employed the effect as early as 1942, her full-length silhouette cast on the phallic Ruins of Windsor, and Friedlander's contemporary Garry Winogrand allowed his shadow to fall on a couple holding chimpanzees in 1967's Central Park Zoo - this self-reflexive trait became Friedlander's trademark. Gelatin silver print - International Center of Photography Collection |
![]() Artwork Images | Central Park, New York City (1992)Artwork description & Analysis: Of all the photographic categories, 'the landscape' can boast the longest history. Moreover, the landscape begets the closest historical correlation between photography and academic painting with the landscapist in both specialisms often becoming preoccupied with chasing a representational precision that might affect in the spectator a heightened awareness of the natural and platonic world. Indeed, Friedlander has tended to shy away from landscapes because of the pointlessness of photographing scenes that, in his words, are already "just too perfect". This image was borne in fact of a commission that only then inspired Friedlander to develop a completely autonomous landscapes collection. Gelatin silver print |
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Content compiled and written by Vitoria Hadba-Groom
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
" Artist Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Vitoria Hadba-Groom
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
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