Known for his complex photographs of the American social landscape, Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) has also photographed his wife, Maria, for many years, directing his relentlessly curious eye to a subject he approaches with tenderness, awe, and amusement. Lee Friedlander: Maria presents a seven-decade extended portrait of the artist’s wife, bringing together more than 70 images tracing the arc of their relationship, through marriage, parenthood, grandparenthood, and beyond.
On the surface, the pictures are a catalogue of the stuff of life: Maria reading, driving, talking on the phone, lying in the sun, reading another book. Sometimes Maria serves as a muse in the traditional sense, and nothing more happens beyond a man marveling at his wife. Many images reflect Friedlander’s sustained appreciation for his wife’s self-possessed style. But eventually, the portraits begin to take on the attributes of Friedlander’s idiosyncratic approach to image-making—shadows, objects, and reflections intrude, and certain images appear as fractured as cracked plates.
Collecting photographs made over the course of a rich and complicated partnership, the book reflects the particular triumphs and mysteries of life with an artist. In an interview with Jeffrey Fraenkel, Maria describes with equanimity the challenges of balancing family life with the pull of Friedlander’s talents, and what she made of his expansive body of work—of which she is a part. As she tells Jeffrey Fraenkel, “I didn’t like every picture and every body of work, but I thought he had something going.”
