Lee Friedlander - Career

Photographer, born in Aberdeen, Washington, USA. An East Coast free-lance commercial photographer and teacher, he used snapshot style photographs to capture surrealistic qualities in everyday life in the 1960s and 1970s.

Lee Friedlander (born July 14, 1934) is an influential American photographer and artist, born in Aberdeen, Washington.

Career

Friedlander studied photography at the Art Center of Los Angeles. In 1960, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Friedlander a grant to focus on his art and made subsequent grants in 1962 and 1977.

Working primarily with a Leica 35mm cameras and black and white film, Friedlander's style focused on the "social landscape". His art 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, the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House mounted Friedlander's first solo museum show. Friedlander was then a key figure in the 1967 "New Documents" exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City along with Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus.

Friedlander now works primarily with medium format cameras.

In 2005, the Museum of Modern Art displayed a major retrospective of Friedlander works.