Lee Friedlander: Signs

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.