Lee Friedlander

(Complexity)

“Decorous enthrallment with beauty dissolves into uncharted fascination with fact”

From coast to coast most of the U.S is a maze of telephone wires, highways, billboards, strip malls, suburbs and gas stations with is exactly the sort of thing that appeals to Friedlander.

Lee Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban “social landscape”, with many of his photographs including fragments of store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and street signs.

MannequinNew York City, 2011Gelatin-silver print

• Returned to a 35-mm camera that he used in the earliest decades of his career

• Roamed sidewalks of NYC, LA and San Francisco, focusing on storefront windows and reflections, which speak to marketplace notions of sex, fashion and consumerism, while recalling Eugene Atget’s surreal photographs of Parisian windows made one-hundred years earlier.

Eugene AtgetAvenue des Gobelins

1925• Appealed greatly to the Parsian avant-garde.

• Surrealists focused onThe lamination of whatWas inside and outsideAnd on the lovely dissolveBetween fact andImagination.

New Mexico

• Began photographing New Mexico in late 1960s

• Part of an ongoing series of landscapes he has been working on for more than a decade

1725-27: New Mexico 2006• Nondescript street in some small town• Primarily a study in geometric shapes• Stop sign dominates picture• Topped by another sign containing the street number• Facing the camera is a corrugated metal building

• False front is shaped like stair steps.

• In between signAnd building, the roadForms a gracefulCrescent.

• ConveysFriedlander's typicallyCool nonchalanceToward his subjectsAlong with hisDistanced, yet playful,Witty and ironicInquisitiveness.