Lee Friedlander (Complexity)

“Decorous enthrallment with beauty dissolves into uncharted fascination with fact” From coast to coast most of the U.S is a maze of telephone wires, highways, billboards, strip malls, suburbs and gas stations with is exactly the sort of thing that appeals to Friedlander.

Lee 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.

Mannequin New York City, 2011 Gelatin-silver print

Returned to a 35-mm camera that he used in the earliest decades of his career Roamed sidewalks of NYC, LA and San Francisco, focusing on storefront windows and reflections, which speak to marketplace notions of sex, fashion and consumerism, while recalling Eugene Atget’s surreal photographs of Parisian windows made one- hundred years earlier.

Eugene Atget Avenue des Gobelins 1925 Appealed greatly to the Parsian avant-garde. Surrealists focused on The lamination of what Was inside and outside And on the lovely dissolve Between fact and Imagination.

New Mexico Began photographing New Mexico in late 1960s Part of an ongoing series of landscapes he has been working on for more than a decade

: New Mexico 2006 Nondescript street in some small town Primarily a study in geometric shapes Stop sign dominates picture Topped by another sign containing the street number Facing the camera is a corrugated metal building False front is shaped like stair steps. In between sign And building, the road Forms a graceful Crescent. Conveys Friedlander's typically Cool nonchalance Toward his subjects Along with his Distanced, yet playful, Witty and ironic Inquisitiveness.