Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) is an American photographer and artist. In the 1960s and 1970s, Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban "social landscape," with many of his photographs including fragments of store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and street signs. His work is characterized by its innovative use of framing and reflection, often using the natural environment or architectural elements to frame his subjects. Over the course of his career, Friedlander has been the recipient of numerous awards and his work has been exhibited in major museums and galleries worldwide (Museum of Modern Art, New York. Corcoran Gallery of Art. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne).
Friedlander was born in Aberdeen, Washington, on July 14, 1934 to Kaari Nurmi (Finnish descent) and Fritz (Fred) Friedlander (a German-Jewish émigré). His mother died of cancer when he was seven years old.
Already earning pocket-money as a photographer since he was 14, he went on at the age of 18 to study photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. In 1956, he moved to New York City, where he photographed jazz musicians for record album covers. His early work was influenced by Eugène Atget, Robert Frank and Walker Evans. Friedlander is regarded as one of Atget's heirs. In 1960, Friedlander was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to focus on his art, and was awarded subsequent grants in 1962 and 1977. Some of his most famous photographs appeared in the September 1985 Playboy, black and white nude photographs of Madonna from the late 1970s. A student at the time, she was paid $25 for her 1979 set. In 2009, one of the images fetched $37,500 at a Christie's Art House auction.
Working primarily with hand-held Leica 35 mm cameras and black-and-white film, Friedlander's style has focused on the "social landscape." His photographs used detached images of urban life, store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, and posters and signs all combining to capture the look of "modern life."
In 1963, Nathan Lyons, assistant director and Curator of Photography at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, mounted Friedlander's first solo exhibition.Friedlander was then a key figure in curator John Szarkowski's 1967 "New Documents" exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York along with Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus. In 1973, his work was honored at the Rencontres d'Arles festival in France with the screening "Soirée américaine : Judy Dater, Jack Welpott, Jerry Uelsmann, Lee Friedlander" presented by Jean-Claude Lemagny. In 1990, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Friedlander a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2005, the Museum of Modern Art presented a major retrospective of Friedlander's career,including nearly 400 photographs from the 1950s to the present; it was presented again in 2008 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.In 2022, contemporary photographer Joseph Maida discussed Friedlander's work from the 1970s and 80's in his monograph A Third Look.
In 2023, Joel Coen curated an exhibition of 70 of Friedlander's photographs, which were shown (45 different photographs at each site) at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and in New York at Luhring Augustine.
While suffering from arthritis and housebound, he focused on photographing his surroundings. His book Stems reflects his life during the time of his knee replacement surgery. He has said that his "limbs" reminded him of plant stems.
Friedlander began photographing parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted for a six-year commission from the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, beginning in 1988. After completing the commission he continued to photograph Olmsted-designed parks for 20 years in total. His series includes New York City's Central Park; Brooklyn's Prospect Park; Manhattan's Morningside Park; World's End in Hingham, Massachusetts; Cherokee Park in Louisville, Kentucky; and Niagara Falls State Park. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the design for Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art held an exhibition of Friedlander's photographs of that park and a book was published, Photographs: Frederick Law Olmsted Landscapes.
Friedlander now works primarily with medium format cameras, such as the Hasselblad Superwide.
It has been claimed that Friedlander is "notoriously media shy," but he did grant an interview to The New York Times in April 2023, in which he discussed his work.