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Price is net to all; promotional discounts do not apply. First edition, first printing. SIgned by Friedlander. Soft cover. Photographically illustrated stiff wrappers; no dust jacket as issued. Photographs and text (untitled preface) by Friedlander. Designed by Friedlander and Marvin Israel. Unpaginated (88 pp.) with 42 plates plus the cover image (not reproduced inside the book), printed by the Meriden Gravure Company, Meriden, Connecticut, from duotone separations made by Richard Benson. 8-1/2 x 9-1/8 inches. [Cited in Andrew Roth, ed., The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century. (New York: PPP Editions in association with Roth Horowitz LLC, 2001), in Andrew Roth, ed., The Open Book. (Göteborg, Sweden: Hasselblad Center in association with Steidl Verlag, Göttingen, Germany, 2004), in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, Volume I. (London and New York: Phaidon, 2004) and in Peter Galassi, Friedlander. (New York: MoMA, 2005), "Books, Special Editions, and Portfolios" (pp. 444-459), #3.] 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). Friedlander's Self-Portraits call attention to the complex, fractured and sometimes dissimulating interplay between various screens, shadows, reflections, lenses and the surfaces of the photographs themselves. Introducing this body of work, Friedlander wrote, "I might call myself an intruder." Following this, in Andrew Roth's Book of 101 Books Vince Aletti asserts, "Friedlander does seem to be lurking or barging into his own pictures -- a hovering, disembodied Everyman, at once here and gone. Like the ephemeral figures in nineteenth-century spirit photos, he appears as a shadow, a reflection, a pair of shoes, a barely discernible shape. Although there are a number of shots where Friedlander's head is clearly visible in a mirror or looms unmediated into the frame, none are conventional or in any sense flattering self-portraits.Mostly, however, he seems determined to remove himself from the frame -- to become not the subject of the picture but just another incidental bit of photographic phenomena, no more important that a shaft of sunlight or a shop window or a passing shadow." Signed by Author.
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