Lee Friedlander (b. 1934)
Washington D.C., 1962
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Leonid and Tatiana Nevzlin Collection
Must Know
The American photographer Lee Friedlander developed an influential language that spoke to the urban “social landscape” of the 1960s and 1970s. Many of his photographs include storefront reflections and structures framed by fences and street signs, the different subjects overlapping as distinct elements without reference. In this work, the artist splits the image, as in a collage.
More Info
Lee Norman Friedlander was born in 1934 into the small fishing community of Aberdeen, Washington. His father, Fritz (Friedlander) was a Polish-Jewish émigré who had arrived in America just before the outbreak of WWI. Friedlander’s mother, Kaari Nurmi, herself an émigré of Finnish descent, died of cancer when her son was just seven years old. he went on at the age of 18, to study photography and In 1956, he moved to New York City,
he began photographing the the American social landscape . In his career spanning seven decades, he produced an unparalleled body of photographic work documenting every aspect of the American “social landscape” . His subjects included: jazz musicians, factory workers, monuments, television screens, self-portraits, nudes, street photographs and landscapes.
His photographs documented the streets and people of America, using detached images of urban life, store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, and posters and signs all combining to capture the look of modern life.[ Using a 35-mm camera, he produced textural black-and-white photographs in a snapshot style, often incorporating his own reflection.
In the 1960s Friedlander emerged, as part of a generation of street photographers, using a “snapshot aesthetic” to capture contemporary urban life with unflinching realism.
Friedlander took frequent road trips throughout the United States, and the people and places he saw on those trips became his primary source material. In 1962–63 he photographed the small televisions that were becoming ubiquitous in houses and motels throughout the country. The photographs are named by the city in which they were taken and include no people, just televisions left on in empty rooms.
