Lee-Friedlander on The Click

6 Photographers on Lee Friedlander’s Timeless Influence

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Daniel Arnold, Sara Cwynar, Stephen Shore and others consider how Friedlander’s disorienting visions of the United States continue to endure.

B: Another dusty old gem

Wed, 15 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Another dusty old gem

My old teacher Rich Rollins recently sent me this chat between JP Caponigro and Lee Friedlander, originally xeroxed from a 2002 issue of C…

Link: http://blakeandrews.blogspot.com/2019/05/another-dusty-old-gem.html

My old teacher Rich Rollins recently sent me this chat between JP Caponigro and Lee Friedlander, originally xeroxed from a 2002 issue of Camera Arts magazine. It contains several pearls of wisdom, tangents, and outright deflections, and is altogether so good I thought I’d share here. Enjoy.

B: Street Resurfacing Project

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Street Resurfacing Project

John Sypal recently sent me a photocopy of this old interview with Garry Winogrand, conducted by Charles Hagen. It was originally published…

Link: http://blakeandrews.blogspot.com/2019/01/street-resurfacing-project.html

John Sypal recently sent me a photocopy of this old interview with Garry Winogrand, conducted by Charles Hagen. It was originally published in Afterimage in December 1977, just before Winogrand’s 50th birthday, and arguably near the peak of his career. Some of the photos included are recognizable from Public Relations which had just been published, and Stock Photographs, which would out a few years later. Maybe they looked good in the original magazine, but here they’re severely degraded by multiple copy/scans. So it’s probably best to ignore them and just enjoy the text, which is chock full of interesting nuggets. To the best of my knowledge this is not online elsewhere. For serious photo nerds only!

Lee Friedlander’s Intimate Portraits of His Wife, Through Sixty Years of Marriage | The New Yorker

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Lee Friedlander’s Intimate Portraits of His Wife, Through Sixty Years of Marriage

Friedlander’s style of photography is usually cool, winking, and gamesman-like, but his pictures of his wife thrum with gentle affection.

via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/lee-friedlanders-intimate-portraits-of-his-wife-through-sixty-years-of-marriage

Lee Friedlander once slyly assessed his promiscuous eye by saying, “I tend to photograph the things that get in front of my camera.” For Friedlander, this was in part a kind of formalist credo: his most innovative photographs are elegant spatial muddles, frames so stuffed to the gills that one imagines his hidebound camera-club contemporaries clutching their manuals in horror. But it was also, of course, an emphatic statement of fact. Like many of the pioneering American photographers of the middle twentieth century, Friedlander’s life in pictures meant pounding the pavement, and piling Kerouacian miles on his odometer in between. Now eighty-four years old, he once said that the longest he’s gone without shooting was the three months it took him to recover from a double knee replacement, in 1998. But the things that got in front of Friedlander’s camera weren’t always out in the wilds of the street. Sometimes, the consummate peripatetic photographed within the quieter confines of his home.

Viewing the World Through Lee Friedlander’s Fences | The New Yorker

Fri, 05 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Viewing the World Through Lee Friedlander’s Chain-Link Fences

The photographer’s new collection bends a ubiquitous, mass-produced object to frame a portrait of American culture.

via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/viewing-the-world-through-lee-friedlanders-fences

Like much of Lee Friedlander’s work, the ninety-seven photographs in his new collection, “Chain Link,” explore broad themes—sex, family, religion, race, nature—with striking wit. Friedlander has released previous series focussing on television screens, on the stems of flowers, and on the backs of heads, and his new book is similarly single-minded. In this series, which is made up of photographs shot over the course of around fifty years, the world is seen through the gray diamonds of chain-link fences. Using this zigzagging thread, Friedlander ties together scenes in distant cities and decades, and bends a ubiquitous, mass-produced object to frame a portrait of American culture.

The Photographer Who Saw America’s Monuments Hiding in Plain Sight - The New York Times

Wed, 11 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The Photographer Who Saw America’s Monuments Hiding in Plain Sight

Lee Friedlander provided an early study of our national fascination with statuary.

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/magazine/the-photographer-who-saw-americas-monuments-hiding-in-plain-sight.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Lee Friedlander’s “The American Monument” was first published in 1976. That’s “monument” singular, though one of the many singular things about Friedlander is that he’s nothing if not a pluralist. Whitman-like, he is great, contains multitudes. In an essay appended to the sumptuous new edition of this landmark work, Peter Galassi (who curated the 2005 Friedlander retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art) deems it “pointless” to try to count precisely how many books the photographer has published since 1976 before settling on roughly one a year. The retrospective was huge, and, inevitably, the accompanying catalog was almost too hefty to lug home comfortably. It was sort of monumental, though monuments tend to be erected to the dead.

How Lee Friedlander Edits His Photo Books | PDNPulse

Wed, 05 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

How Lee Friedlander Edits His Photo Books | PDNPulse

Lee Friedlander has published 50 books in his career to date. And he’s not stopping. The legendary photographer (born 1933) and his grandson, Giancarlo T. Roma, recently revived Haywire Press, the self-publishing company Friedlander established in the 197

via PDNPulse: https://pdnpulse.pdnonline.com/2017/07/lee-friedlander-edits-photo-books.html

Friedlander said he typically Xeroxes his photos, then uses a hole-punch to put three holes on the left and right side of the images. That way, he said, when he puts them into a three-ring binder to see how they work in sequence, he can also easily switch the order, moving them from the left side to the right and back again as he wishes. When he thinks a book is done, he said, he’ll take a second look and almost always decide that two images facing each other have to be swapped.

Lee Friedlander's Photos of 1960s T.V. Sets - The New York Times

Mon, 03 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Lee Friedlander’s Photos of 1960s T.V. Sets

Lee Friedlander’s series “The Little Screens” was an early artistic attempt to document television’s nascent dominance of America.

via Lens Blog: https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/07/03/lee-friedlanders-photos-of-1960s-t-v-sets/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Multimedia&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body

As such, it is disconcerting to see the installation of Lee Friedlander’s prescient “The Little Screens” on the wall at Pier 24 in San Francisco, as 50 pictures are featured in “The Grain of the Present,” the current exhibition curated by Pier 24’s director, Christopher McCall. It’s interesting to view “The Little Screens” as the first artistic attempt to document television’s nascent dominance of America. The pictures were first shot in the early ’60s, when “Bonanza” and “Gunsmoke” were must-see T.V., and John F. Kennedy was president.

Lee Friedlander's Overlooked Civil Rights Photos - The New York Times

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Lee Friedlander’s Overlooked Civil Rights Photos

The photographs in Lee Friedlander’s book “Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom” are of a subject not usually associated with him: the civil rights movement. Among his earliest and least typical images — the photographer was only 22 when he made them — they document a historic, if lesser known, event in the struggle for racial equality and justice.

Dressing Up: Fashion Week NYC with Lee Friedlander | PDN Photo of the Day

Wed, 18 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Link:

In 2006, Lee Friedlander was hired by New York Times Magazine Director of Photography Kathy Ryan to photograph backstage at the Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Zac Posen, Oscar de la Renta and Proenza Schouler shows

Lee Jumps The Shark

Sat, 01 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Lee Jumps The Shark

For fans of Lee Friedlander, his recent book Mannequin offers good news and bad. The good news is that the master has returned to the 35 m…

Link: http://blakeandrews.blogspot.com/2012/08/lee-jumps-shark.html

For fans of Lee Friedlander, his recent book Mannequin offers good news and bad. The good news is that the master has returned to the 35 mm format with which he established his reputation during the first half of a sterling career. The bad news is that he appears sorely out of practice. I’m not sure what’s going on

LEE FRIEDLANDER: "Out of the Cool" (1991)

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

‘Like a One Eyed Cat’, Lee Friedlander - Out of the Cool

Haverstraw, New York, 1966

Friedlander is a photographer, never forget. Although a major photographic artist, he is not an ‘artist utilising photography.’ He uses the camera, that unthinking machine, to transcribe his visual perceptions of the world.

via AMERICAN SUBURB X: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/07/lee-friedlander-out-of-cool-1991.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Americansuburb+(AMERICANSUBURBX)

The second essay I ever wrote upon the subject of photography was about the work of Lee Friedlander, on the occasion of an exhibition of his pictures at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, in 1976.2 Now, some fifteen years later, a much larger retrospective, Like a One-Eyed Cat, arrives at the Victoria and Albert Museum, having the benefit of much fine work completed in the interim, and accompanied by the most extensive monograph on the photographer to date.3 And published almost concurrently is the eagerly awaited volume of his remarkable and controversial studies of the female nude.4

PDNPulse: Gallery and Library Buy Make Yale Largest Holder of Lee Friedlander’s Work

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Also included in the acquisition are 40,000 rolls of film spanning Friedlander’s work since the mid-1950s.

Link: PDNPulse: Gallery and Library Buy Make Yale Largest Holder of Lee Friedlander’s Work

AMERICANSUBURB X: THEORY: "Lee Friedlander - Just Look At It" (2005)

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Lee Friedlander: “Just Look At It” (2005)

By Rod Slemmons

Lee Friedlander was born in the logging mill town of Aberdeen, Washington in 1934. He began photographing in 1948 because of a “fascination with the equipment,” in his words. His first paid job was a Christmas card photograph of a dog for a local madam named Peggy Plus. He later a

via AMERICAN SUBURB X: https://americansuburbx.com/2010/02/theory-lee-friedlander-just-look-at-it.html

It has become increasingly difficult to see photographs as the visible world has been almost completely plastered over with lenticular representations of itself. Strangely, as the photograph becomes the world, it disappears – or perhaps more accurately, it loses its informative opacity

Mr. Lee Friedlander – NOT IF BUT WHEN

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

via: Mr. Lee – BRIAN ULRICH : NOT IF BUT WHEN