Richard Avedon photographs Lee Friedlander, 2002. Photography by Maria Friedlander

Lee Friedlander and Richard Avedon in Front of the Camera

In 2002, while preparing for a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Richard Avedon made a list of people he would like to photograph, including artists, writers, performers, and friends. Among the subjects was Lee Friedlander, who agreed to the portrait on the condition that in exchange, he could photograph Avedon. On May 24, 2002, the two met in Friedlander’s backyard to make the pictures, accompanied by Avedon’s assistants.⠀⠀

Lee Friedlander photographs Richard Avedon, 2002. Photography by Maria Friedlander
Lee Friedlander, Avedon, 2002
gelatin silver print, 20 x 16 inches (sheet) [50.8 x 40.6 cm]

The following year, Lee’s wife Maria sent Jeffrey Fraenkel some of the photographs from the day. In her letter, saved in the gallery’s archives, Friedlander writes about the encounter. “I remember thinking it was an historic moment taking place down in our backyard, so I grabbed my point/and/shoot camera and followed them,” she notes. 

Richard Avedon photographs Lee Friedlander, 2002. Photography by Maria Friedlander
Richard Avedon, Lee Friedlander, Photographer, New City, NY, May 24, 2002
gelatin silver print, 24 x 20 inches (sheet) [61.0 x 50.8 cm]

A few years later Jeffrey Fraenkel wrote about the afternoon in Aperture (in an essay originally published as part of an exhibition catalogue), exploring the differences between the photographers and the artistic traditions they each came from. Although “made within a few seconds and a few feet of each other,” their photographs appear to come “from entirely different planets,” he observes.

Read the Aperture article here.