| Dates: | 1934, 14 July - | | Born: | US, WA, Aberdeen | | Active: | US |
American photographer.Preparing biographies
Together with figures such as Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander transformed American documentary photography in the 1960's. By the late 1970's he was widely seen as one of the most penetrating photographers of American cities. In Friedlander’s images, surfaces are frequently broken, disrupted, or complicated; objects jut forward, obscuring others. Mirrors and windows reflect and refract events already in flux. Through his oblique take on the social and visual fabric of townscapes, unexpected patterns and social processes emerge.
This biography is courtesy and copyright of the Victoria & Albert Museum and is included here with permission.
Date last updated: 11 Nov 2011.
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Biography provided by Focal Press
In a stream of conscious that has spanned four decades and two-dozen books, Friedlander constructs an interior world that was not apparent until it was formally organized through his camera. The discontinuous urban landscape is raw material for a hybrid, formalized, and personalized aesthetic that reshaped American street photography. With satirical humor, Friedlander orders fragmented chaos to characterize his place within society as the defining concept of what he called "the American social landscape and its conditions." The urban landscape becomes a stage for an investigation of the human presence within its enclosures, juxtapositions, and reflective
and transparent surfaces that form overlapping realities within a single frame. His images within images approach involves an often extremely complex piecing together, a reading of all the interconnected parts and signs to determine meaning. Favoring the ordinary subjects from televisions to trees, Friedlander works in series to do away with their hierarchical ordering, thus making objects, people, places, and time interchangeable. He forces viewers to search for a lone, human presence, often Friedlander’s shadow (an assimilated Jew), which could be anyone’s shadow, in a desolate landscape from which God has vanished.
(Author: Robert Hirsch - Independent scholar and writer)
Michael Peres (Editor-in-Chief), 2007, Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th edition, (Focal Press) [ISBN-10: 0240807405, ISBN-13: 978-0240807409]
(Used with permission)
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Family history
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National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.)
https://www.nga.gov
Has major collections of Harry Callahan, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, Irving Penn and Alfred Stieglitz. There are a number of exhibitions on-line but to locate the holdings for an individual photographer you need to use the search options
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The following books are useful starting points to obtain brief biographies but they are not substitutes for the monographs on individual photographers. |
• Beaton, Cecil & Buckland, Gail 1975 The Magic Eye: The Genius of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown & Company) p.250 [Useful short biographies with personal asides and one or more example images.]
• Capa, Cornell (ed.) 1984 The International Center of Photography: Encyclopedia of Photography (New York, Crown Publishers, Inc. - A Pound Press Book) p.213
• Coke, Van Deren with Diana C. Du Pont 1986 Photography: A Facet of Modernism (New York: Hudson Hills Press, The San Francisco Museum of Art) p.173
• Evans, Martin Marix (Executive ed.) 1995 Contemporary Photographers [Third Edition] (St. James Press - An International Thomson Publishing Company) [Expensive reference work but highly informative.]
• International Center of Photography 1999 Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection (New York: A Bulfinch Press Book) p.216 [Includes a well written short biography on Lee Friedlander with example plate(s) earlier in book.]
• Lenman, Robin (ed.) 2005 The Oxford Companion to the Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press) [Includes a short biography on Lee Friedlander.]
• Weaver, Mike (ed.) 1989 The Art of Photography 1839-1989 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press) p.457 [This exhibition catalogue is for the travelling exhibition that went to Houston, Canberra and London in 1989.]
• Witkin, Lee D. and Barbara London 1979 The Photograph Collector’s Guide (London: Secker and Warburg) p.145-146 [Long out of print but an essential reference work - the good news is that a new edition is in preparation.]
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If there is an analysis of a single photograph or a useful self portrait I will highlight it here. |
Photographic collections are a useful means of examining large numbers of photographs by a single photographer on-line.
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Library of Congress, Washington, USA
Approximate number of records: 1
Note: A single record may contain more than one photograph. | Click here |
| "I always wanted to be a photographer. I was fascinated with the materials. But I never dreamed I would be having this much fun. I imagined something much less elusive, much more mundane." | | "Photography is a generous medium" |
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