Lee Friedlander

One of the masters of contemporary photography, Lee Friedlander has dedicated his career to the documentation of everyday life in the United States. His images are characterized by a composition that utilizes the urban geometry of storefronts and street signs—and later car windows and telephone poles—as a framing technique. This catalog, published in conjunction with a retrospective organized by the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid, surveys the wide scope of Friedlander’s career from the 1960s to today. High-quality reproductions of all of the exhibited works are supplemented by text written by curator Carlos Gollonet and photographer Nicholas Nixon.

The volume serves as a comprehensive guide to Friedlander’s body of work, with personal insight provided through an interview between Maria Friedlander and gallery director Jeffrey Fraenkel, as well as a chronology of the artist’s life by his grandson Giancarlo T. Roma.

Lee Friedlander was born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1934, and studied photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. In 1956 he moved to New York City, which quickly became both the setting and subject of the majority of his work. Friedlander was represented alongside Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand in the 1967 New Documents exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, now understood as a landmark event in American documentary photography. Friedlander still lives and works in New York, and is represented by the Fraenkel Gallery.