Friedlander First Fifty: An Inside Look at American Photographer Lee Friedlander's First Fifty Books

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.

Born in Aberdeen, Washington in 1934, Lee Friedlander began photographing at the age of fourteen. In 1967, Friedlander’s work was included in the highly influential New Documents exhibition, curated by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art. Two years later, he would publish his first of 51 books (to date), beginning a career of extraordinary photographic production.     

Embracing each subject with equal passion, Friedlander has photographed nearly every facet of American life from the 1950’s to the present, from factories in Pennsylvania, to the jazz scene in New Orleans, to the deserts of the Southwest. To describe his interest in photographing America and its people, he coined the term “the American social landscape” in an interview in 1964.
  
Over the past five decades, Friedlander’s work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, as well as dozens of other institutions in the United States and around the world. In 2005, Friedlander was the subject of a major traveling retrospective and catalogue organized by the Museum of Modern Art, the first of its kind for a living photographer. Among the many awards he has received are three Guggenheim Fellowships, three National Endowment for the Arts Grants, a Hasselblad Award, and a MacArthur Genius Grant. He was also awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Pratt Institute.

At 86 years old, Friedlander continues to produce work, publishing multiple books and exhibiting his work nationally and internationally every year.

SPQR Editions is a boutique publisher of curated photography books based in Brooklyn, NY. The advocacy for quality in books is apparent in the mission of SPQR, which stands for Senatus Populusque Romanus, "The Roman Senate and People," and its commitment to being a nonprofit corporation. In order to be made more accessible to the public, the books are made in the highest quality possible—handsomely printed in duotone ink at a local industria Grafica SiZ in Verona, Italy.