Saturday, March 28, 2009
Lee Friedlander Photography Exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art
March 1 – May 31, 2009We are big fans of Lee Friedlander. He is a very under rated photographer who has spent his life chronicling American life in all it’s honestly. Think Robert Frank’s The Americans without the Jack Kerouac intro. (Which is probably the only thing separating the popularity of Robert Frank from Friedlander). We highly recommend checking out this exhibit and we have pulled some Friedlander books out of our vault and are proudly displaying them (two first editions, one signed by Friedlander and a more recent compilation).
This description was taken from the Cleveland Museum of Arts website concerning the Friedlander exhibit:
While Lee Friedlander’s name may not be a household word, his photographs are widely familiar as iconic representations of common American experience. Born in 1934, he gained fame in the early 1960s with off-balance street photographs that evoke the complexity the modern world. Explore Friedlander’s witty and unblinking view of everyday American life in this expansive exhibition that gathers some 375 photographs plus special edition books and portfolios to trace a five-decade career.
Always working in series, Friedlander mines what he calls “the American social landscape,” beginning with a layered view of city streets—shop fronts, ads, televisions, and cars. This central theme is supplemented by subjects including portraits, self-portraits, landscapes, still lifes, nudes, and studies of people at work. This body of work stands as one of the major achievements in 20th-century art, combining astute observation and graphic verve to present a compelling vision of contemporary America.