Friedlander First Fifty - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1576879526 ISBN 13: 9781576879528

Publisher: powerHouse Books, 2019

Synopsis

With a career spanning seven decades, renowned American photographer Lee Friedlander has produced an unrivaled photographic output documenting seemingly every aspect of the American “social landscape” (a term Friedlander coined), with a specific focus on creating books. “Books are my medium,” Friedlander has been quoted as saying.

Friedlander First Fifty provides an inside look at Friedlander’s first fifty books, featuring extensive commentary directly from Friedlander on his own work. The book contains photographs from each of the first fifty books, as well as descriptions, publication information, and most notably, interviews with Friedlander and his wife, Maria, conducted by Friedlander’s grandson, Giancarlo, and daughter, Anna, who together co-published the book. The result is the most personal and candid look at Friedlander’s life and career to date, as told to his own family. 

Published over a fifty year period, from 1969-2018, the first fifty books describe the entirety of subject matter -- from jazz musicians to factory workers to monuments to television screens -- and genres -- from self-portraits to street photographs to nudes to landscapes -- Friedlander has explored. 

Containing the largest collection of Friedlander’s own quotes ever published, Friedlander First Fifty offers a behind-the-scenes look at the photographer’s diverse oeuvre that contextualizes and brings new life to the work, for everyone from the casual art appreciator to the most ardent Friedlander fan.

About this title

About the Author

Lee Friedlander, born in 1934, began photographing the American social landscape in 1948. With an ability to organize a vast amount of visual information in dynamic compositions, Friedlander has made humorous and poignant images among the chaos of city life, dense natural landscape, and countless other subjects. Friedlander is also recognized for a group of self-portraits he began in the 1960s, reproduced in Self Portrait, an exploration that he turned to again in the late 1990s, and published in a monograph by Fraenkel Gallery in 2000. Friedlander’s work was included in the highly influential 1967 New Documents exhibition, curated by John Szarkowski at the MoMA, NY. In 2005, Friedlander was the recipient of the prestigious Hasselblad Award as well as the subject of a major traveling retrospective and catalog organized by the Museum of Modern Art. His work is held by major collections including Art Institute of Chicago;, George Eastman Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art; The National Gallery of Art; San Francisco Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others.

Edition details

• Publisher: powerHouse Books
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1576879526
• ISBN 13: 9781576879528
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 176