Lee Friedlander

Lee Friedlander made what he called the social landscape, a photography not of untouched nature but of roads, storefronts, signs, windows, cars, and the built environment of modern America^*1. Born in Aberdeen, Washington, he studied photography in Los Angeles and from the mid-1950s worked in New York for magazines such as Esquire and Sports Illustrated. In 1966 he took part in Nathan Lyons’s exhibition Toward a Social Landscape, which proposed exactly this new field of attention^*1. The following year, in New Documents, John Szarkowski described photographers such as Friedlander as shifting documentary away from social reform and toward a more personal way of knowing the world^*2. Friedlander’s pictures are built from layers: reflections in shop windows, mirrors, and glass; overlapping spaces where transparency and blockage coexist; and the sub-frames formed by telephone booths, road signs, fences, and other pieces of street furniture^*3. By applying that method to the American street, he transformed obstruction, accident, and visual confusion into a rigorous photographic language. His recurring self-portraits, made through shadows or reflections, also challenged the assumption that the photographer should remain invisible. Critics often describe his work as combining the clarity of Walker Evans and Eugène Atget with a distinctly pop irony and wit^*4. Friedlander became one of the defining figures of postwar American photography by turning ordinary visual clutter into one of the medium’s most sophisticated formal languages^*5.