Lee Friedlander

Friedlander’s street is a metaphor for the American social landscape. Flattening a dynamic space into a photographic image, people and objects are reflected in windows and mirrors, framed by lamp posts and doors, creating new relationships and narratives. 

Friedlander’s 1960s photographs show television screens in motel rooms and other anonymous spaces, transmitting images of pop icons, political figures, or minor celebrities. Called by Walker Evans “deft, witty, spanking little poems of hate,” the images reveal an emerging reality—the omnipresence of screens and the drone of television voices in an increasingly isolationist culture.

The landscape—especially the extravagantly varied landscape of the American West—has been a recurring subject for Friedlander. The artist frequently employs flash, even in daylight, to meld foreground and background. The resulting densely layered compositions draw the viewer into idiosyncratic qualities of the terrain.

Friedlader has joked, “I tend to photograph the things that get in front of my camera.” This includes his own family and friends, colleagues, and strangers. People are depicted in private spaces and at work, alone and in crowds, unguarded in front of the artist’s lens.

Friedlander’s photographs capture dispatches and communiques in public spaces—including in graffiti, advertising, and street signs. His wittily composed images range from singular letters that seem to contain a rich story within a single character to full sentences that vary in topic and tone.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, the artist photographed jazz, country, and blues artists in studios, during performances, and on tour. His portraits of musicians and jazz marching bands in New Orleans are a passionate document of the American music scene.

In images made in the 1970s, Friedlander complicates notions of commemoration by photographing statues and monuments dwarfed by their environment, or taking on an alternate role within their surroundings.