Lee Friedlander: Kitaj [SIGNED by Friedlander]

Price is net to all; promotional discounts do not apply. First edition, first printing. Signed by Friedlander on the title page. Hardcover. Photographically illustrated laminated paper-covered boards, no dust jacket as issued. Photographs by Lee Friedlander. Foreword by Maria Friedlander. Afterword by R.B. Kitaj. 120 pp. with 94 duotone plates, beautifully printed by Meridian Printing, Rhode Island from separations made by Thomas Palmer. 9-3/4 x 9-3/4 inches. This first edition was limited to 1080 hardbound copies. Out of print. Lee Friedlander's work is widely known for transforming our visual understanding of contemporary American culture. Known for passionately embracing all subject matter, Friedlander photographed nearly every facet of American life from the 1950s to the present. From factories in Pennsylvania, to the jazz scene in New Orleans, to the deserts of the Southwest, Friedlander's complex formal visual strategies continue to influence the way we understand, analyze, and experience modern American experience. Friedlander's work continues to influence photographic practice internationally, in part due to the heightened sense of self-awareness that is a trademark of so many of his photographs and in part because of his ability to embrace wide-ranging subject matter, always interpreting it in an elegance that hadn't existed prior to his work. As New (from Friedlander's personal archive). "A great photograph is like a great translation, which gives you a little something of a more gorgeous original. It's a short-lived illusion glancing my day. That's why we place photos of loved ones around the house. They escape the tomb, don't they? We read and reread them into a spectral life." --R.B. Kitaj. "I can sympathize with Kitaj that at times he would wish to look better in a certain photo, to be rendered differently. But there we are, both Kitaj and myself, I for more than forty years and Kitaj for over thirty, accepting ourselves as subjects for a photographer we trust." --Maria Friedlander From the publisher: "An intimate friendship of more than three decades is chronicled here, along with the aesthetic evolution of two major American artists. R.B. Kitaj's unusual, handsome, troubled, charismatic face has been a rich subject for Lee Friedlander's camera since the two artists became friends in 1970, when both were teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles. Kitaj begins and ends with photographs shot in Los Angeles, and the artist's passage from raw and vigorous young man to grizzly, white-haired prophet is charted through more than 90 images. A frank and moving series of images from 1994, focused on Kitaj during the days following his wife Sandra's sudden and unexpected death, achieve a disarming intimacy that could only have been the result of a deep and trusting friendship. Kitaj includes a reminiscence by Kitaj himself as well as an introduction by Friedlander's wife, Maria.". Signed by Author.…