Detail View: The AMICA Library: Monsey, New York

CMA_.1989.426

1998

Photographs

Friedlander, Lee

North American; American

artist

1934

Lee Friedlander American, 1934-Lee Friedlander has retained a democratic documentary style throughout his career. Known for giving every disparate element equal status within his frames, he works with a 35mm camera and black-and-white film. His images ofstreet scenes, urban and suburban buildings, storefront reflections, monuments, desert landscapes, and social gatherings are understated examinations of American vernacular culture. He uses devices such as multiple reflections, obstructed vantage points,and overlying shadows to assist his visions, which are characterized by formal coherence, aloof distance, and ironic ambiguity. Born in Aberdeen, Washington, Friedlander took up photography in 1948. He studied for two years at the Los Angeles Art Center School (1953-55), leaving to work with Edward Kaminski. Enamored of jazz, Friedlander completed many assignments for album jacket covers for Columbia, rca, and Atlantic Records before moving to New York City in 1956. His portraits of New Orleans jazz musicians earned him the first of three fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1960, 1962, 1977) and his first one-person show at George Eastman House, Rochester (1966). During that time, he also rediscovered and salvaged the work of E.J. Bellocq, an early 20th-century New Orleans photographer, and collaborated with Jim Dine to produce a book of photographs and etchings, Work from the Same House (1969). In the 1970s Friedlander began work on a series of overlooked, often abandoned memorials in town squares and city parks across America. Published as The American Monument (1976), the images reveal a forgotten history, embodied in overgrown, unattended, and eroding icons. Later in the decade he turned his camera more directly to the beauty of nature, resulting in Flowers and Trees (1981) and Cherry Blossom Time in Japan (1986). His extensive series of unconventional and highly tangible nudes culminated in the book Lee Friedlander Nudes and a one-person show of the subject at the MuseumofModern Art, New York (1991). In the 1980s, Friedlander went into the workplace of computer operators to document the changes in American labor. Exhibited at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988, the series reveals a marked shift from the more mechanized, industrial division of labor revealed in his earlier books Factory Valleys (1982) and Cray at Chippewa Falls (1987). Throughout his career, Friedlander has photographed family and friends, publishing several of the images as Lee Friedlander Portraits (1985). One of his favorite and most enigmatic models has been his wife, Marie DePaoli, whom he married in 1958. His honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1972, 1977) and the MacArthur Foundation (1990),the Medal of the City of Paris (1981), and the Edward MacDowell Medal (1986). He has had three one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1972, 1974, 1991), and a major retrospective organized by the Seattle Art Museum, with an accompanying publication titled Like a One-Eyed Cat (1989). Friedlander lives in New York. A.W.

M

Lee Friedlander

Monsey, New York

Primary

Full View

1963

1963

1963

gelatin silver print

Photography

Image: 15.1cm x 23cm

The Cleveland Museum of Art

Cleveland, Ohio, USA

1989.426

Purchased with a grant from the NEA and matched by contributions from Museum members in 1989

Written in pink felt pen on verso: "10 [crossed out]"; in pencil: "E/11-31 Rockland Co N.Y. / Lee Friedlander [signed] / Monsey N.Y. 1969 11-31"

copyright ? 1978 Lee Friedlander

http://www.clemusart.com/museum/disclaim2.html

Lee Friedlander has maintained a direct and witty style throughout his distinguished career of over 30 years. To produce his simply transcribed, straight-forward, unmanipulated black-and-white prints, he relies on a hand-held 35mm camera. Friedlander's images abound with visual detail and dramatic richness. His probing, forever curious eye finds the obvious and mundane as well as the hidden and eccentric. In Monsey, New York, for example, we become viewers at a drive-in movie theater, with an image of John F. Kennedy's smiling face beaming towards us.

CMA_.1989.426.tif