Look Inside
Which art books, prints and posters are available by and about this artist? Here is a sample of items of interest to a typical collector:
Ltd edition book with one of 36 prints, each in an edition of 5. Slipcase has some rubbing marks, book's cover is fine. The ltd edition book is a cloth boards as issued, only the trade edition has a DJ.
The print for this particular edition can be accessed here.
From 1973 to 1974, Lee Friedlander and Burt Wolf edited four iconic portfolios at the Double Elephant Press in New York, featuring photographs by some of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century: Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander himself. Each of the four limited edition portfolios contained fifteen photographs by each artist, representing their distinct visions that can be described in the words of Walker Evans as “oddly refreshing, unselfconsciously striking, and unpredictably adventurous.”
This publication from 2015 honored the unique collaborative project that was to become a touchstone in the history of photography.
Through 192 square-format, black-and-white images Friedlander reframes the built environment, from monumental city skyscrapers to rural homes and everyday urban architecture. Rather than focusing purely on grand landmarks, Friedlander turns his lens to the "social landscape" of America. The book highlights the unremarkable and uncelebrated elements of urban environments, treating these structures with equal importance:
Published in 1982 by Callaway Editions, Factory Valleys originated from a 1979 commission by the Akron Art Museum. The museum invited Friedlander to document the industrial belt of the Ohio River Valley, specifically regions across Ohio and Pennsylvania, during a pivotal era when the area was sliding into economic decline, just before the term "Rust Belt" gained widespread use.
The book stands as Friedlander's first major body of work focused on American industrial labor and the working class. Over the course of a year, he photographed factory workers operating complex machinery, residential mill towns, sprawling steel plants, rail yards, and stark winter landscapes. Instead of taking a purely political or sentimental documentary stance, Friedlander captured the symbiotic, highly repetitive relationship between human labor and heavy machinery with clarity and acute perception.
Visually, the project expands Friedlander’s signature style of social landscape photography. He framed the industrial towns through layered, complex compositions that echo the social and physical disruption of the area. Featuring an afterword by Leslie Katz, Factory Valleys is widely considered a landmark work in modern documentary photography, capturing the grit, labor, and changing environment of America's industrial heartland.
The plates were produced by the legendary Meriden Gravure Company in Connecticut, working from halftone negatives created by master printer Richard Benson. Benson was a crucial collaborator for Lee Friedlander throughout his book-publishing career, pioneering techniques to translate the nuanced gray tones and deep blacks of gelatin silver photographs into ink on paper.
The book was printed using an ultra-fine 300-line screen offset lithography process. Most standard photobooks at the time used 150- to 200-line screens; the much higher resolution of a 300-line screen made the halftone dot pattern virtually invisible to the naked eye.
Lee Friedlander, American, b.1934
Firedlander was born in Aberdeen, Washington, and became interested in photography at age fourteen. He studied photography at the Art Center School in Los Angeles from 1953 to 1955 and then began freelancing. His work appeared in Esquire, Art in America, Sports Illustrated, and other periodicals, and he had his first solo exhibition at the George Eastman House in 1963. Subsequent exhibitions of his work include "Toward a Social Landscape" at the George Eastman House in 1966 and "New Documents" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967, both of which identified his photographs with those of other "social landscape" photographers such as Garry Winogrand, Bruce Davidson, Danny Lyon, and Diane Arbus.
Friedlander has published books regularly: Work from the Same House (with Jim Dine, 1969), Self-Portrait (1970), The American Monument (1976), Flowers and Trees (1981), Lee Friedlander: Portraits (1985), and Cray at Chippewa Falls (1987) and The Little Screens (2001). He has also produced the book Nudes (1991), and The Jazz People of New Orleans (1992). He has received a number of awards for his photography, including three Guggenheim Fellowships; five National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships; and a MacArthur Foundation Award. Friedlander is responsible for printing the negatives of the turn-of-the-century New Orleans photographer E.J. Bellocq, whom he rescued from oblivion.
Friedlander's photography follows in the tradition of documentary photography as practiced by Walker Evans and Robert Frank. It is unusual for street photography in that it possesses a constant awareness of the photographer's relationship to the picture plane and places at least as much importance on it as on the image's ostensible subject--usually something like an empty street, a store window, or an unremarkable piece of town statuary. Friedlander's photographs also often contain his shadow and/or reflection, which lends an odd, uncomfortable edge to his observations.
Lee Friedlander's The Little Screens first appeared as a 1963 photo-essay in Harper's Bazaar, with commentary by Walker Evans. Six untitled photographs show television screens broadcasting eerily glowing images of faces and figures into unoccupied rooms in homes and motels across America. As distinctive a portrait of an era as Robert Frank's The Americans, The Little Screens grew in number and was not brought together in its entirety until a 2001 exhibition at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. This copy is the limited edition of the accompanying catalog.