Lee Friedlander

MoMA's retrospective of Lee Friedlander's photographs opened recently at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. It's a huge show and a lot of fun to take time looking through. Here are a few favorites.


Maria Friedlander, Southwestern United States, 1969

This (of course) looks better in person than it does in this photo of a photo, but the image is a good representation of Friendlander's use of reflection to set up ambiguous relationships among the places, things and people in his photos.

Carol Armstrong (in Artforum International) said of this photo:

One of my favorite photographs in the early part of the exhibition is Friedlander's 1969 "portrait" of his wife, Maria Friedlander, Southwestern United States. An obvious riff on Robert Frank's images of cars, telephone wires, backyards, and his own wife, it encapsulates Friedlander's complex signature and its ability to morph and move in new directions rather than remain an easy, self-satisfied formula. It has it all, layered onto the single opaque/transparent surface of the photograph, which is much more than the Magritte-like collapse of cloudy sky into car interior that it at first appears to be.

This next, much more recent photo (you can tell, because it's shot with a square format camera instead of the 35mm Friedlander used until the 1990s) was used on the poster for the Fraenkel Gallery's exhibit of Friendlander's work called America by Car.

Again, reflections but also buildings and incredible angles interacting with the layers.


Self-portraits recur throughout Friedlander's career. These two were juxtaposed near the end of the exhibit. At left, Lee and Maria Friedlander. At right, Friedlander with his granddaughter (whose name I failed to write down). Most of the self portraits are not like these two -- often the "portrait" is just Friedlander's shadow overlapping the scene as one more layer in his multi-layered compositions.

There are over 500 pictures in the exhibit, plus copies of all of Friedlander's photo books, so these few images don't begin to represent the range of subjects. Check it out if you get the chance, or if not, try to get your hands on the exhibit catalog published by MoMA, called simply Friedlander.