Lee Friedlander: The Mind and the Hand
Lee Friedlander: The Mind and the Hand
A six-volume suite of portraits by Friedlander titled Lee Friedlander: The Mind and the Hand, is in preparation and will be published by Eakins Press in the spring of 2019.
The book presents the photographer’s intimate portraits of six of his best friends taken over the past five decades. The subjects, each presented in their own separate volume, comprise important people of one of America’s most fertile periods in photography: Richard Benson, William Christenberry, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, John Szarkowski and Garry Winogrand.
Each volume begins with a relevant quote from its subject.
About Lee Friedlander :
Lee Friedlander is an iconic American photographer known for his innovative images of city streets.
Often featuring candid portraits of people, signs, and reflections of himself in store front windows, Friedlander’s street photography captures the unexpected overlaps of light and content in urban landscapes.
Born in 1934, he began photographing the American social landscape in 1948. With an ability to organize a vast amount of visual information in dynamic compositions, Friedlander has made humorous and poignant images among the chaos of city life, dense natural landscape, and countless other subjects.
Influenced by the work of Eugène Atget and Walker Evans, with Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, Friedlander was represented in the historic “New Documents” exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1967, curated by John Szarkowski.
He went on to publish his acclaimed photobook The American Monument in 1976.
His black and white photographs, shot, as was the preference of the new documentarians, with his 35mm Leica, would tend therefore to promote fragmented and uncoordinated compositions over geometric and spatial alignment.
Indeed, the bent of documentary photography heretofore was to offer the spectator a window on reality whereas the meanings carried in Friedlander’s images remain deliberately obscure and equivocal.
He has always said: “I’m not a premeditative photographer, you don’t have to go looking for pictures. The material is generous. You go out and the pictures are staring at you.”
The artist continues to live and work in New York, NY. Today, his photographs are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among others.
Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: Eakins Press Foundation (23 April 2019)
Language: English
Product Dimensions: 9 x 8.5 inches
Weight: 1.1 pounds
Lee Friedlander (born July 14, 1934) is an American photographer and artist. In the 1960s and 1970s 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.
