Lee Friedlander: A Perfect Framing of American Everyday Life

An everyday narration, visual elements that may seem confusing or an ironic sense in which he juxtaposes disjointed objects and ideas that contrast with the seriousness in the visual narration of other photographers.

Incorporating a banal repertoire, such as a shadow cast on a naked body, a window that shows us a double reflection, the chaos of urban signs and their media advertisements, Madonna's naked body when she was not known, lonely characters, friends, racial segregation, self-portraits, even his exit from the ICU,… they build, the personal narration of the everyday in the last six decades of the photographer Lee Friedlander (Aberdeen, USA, 1934).

Friedlander counters the ideals of modern practice by looking to popular culture for inspiration, much like pop art did, thus breaking with traditional means of representation.

The exhibition

Sixties

During the 1960s, commissioned works forced Friedlander to travel across the country, resulting in his most artistic work. He takes numerous portraits of jazz musicians commissioned by Marvin Israel, director of the Atlantic Records label, the only samples of color photographs that we find throughout his entire career, as well as other more personal projects. This is the case of The Little Screens. A set that belongs (with the exception of one of them) to the Fundación MAPFRE Collections and in which there appear elements that will recur throughout his work, such as the union of disparate objects that in their association generate irony and humor.

During the seventies, Lee Friedlander refined his language and the juxtapositions of the previous photographs diminished, in an organization of the space that is less chaotic: Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1972, is a good example, since in this image all the objects are contemplated with the same sharpness.

One of the relevant characteristics of the artist's work is the subversion of the rules of photography, an aspect is especially evident in The American Monument, 1976, one of his best-known projects, but also in the nudes and self-portraits, as well as in family photographs. The latter, to which Friedlander gives special care and attention, are images that apparently could have been taken by any of us, but show the greatest affection and respect, which is not to say sentimentality. Maria, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1970, is one of the best known images of his wife, with whom he has lived for more than sixty years.

Nineties

At the beginning of the nineteen-nineties, the artist changed his small-format camera to a Hasselblad when he was interested in photographing the American landscape, which allowed him to continue working on the subjects that interest him, but with a wider field. Thanks to the new format, it is able to cover larger spaces and the motifs seem to gain entity and body.

From this period are also different projects that he carried out on request, such as Factory valleys, 1982, in which he documents the industrial area of ​​the Ohio River Valley, but in this case focused on the workers at the time of their work. Similar characteristics is the series from Omaha, Nebraska, 1995; in this case, large-format photographs centered on the heads of the telemarketers who are the protagonists of the compositions.

Years two thousand and two thousand and ten

The new dimension of space that the Hasselblad camera offers makes the proximity of the photographer with the motifs he represents and of these with the viewer is increasingly evident. This is the case in the images that make up the book America by Car, published in 2010. A two-year project in which he travels fifty states of the country in rented cars. The result is photographs that include shadows, steering wheels, dashboards or rear-view mirrors between which bridges, monuments, churches, motels or bars slip into the extreme, taking the complexity of the compositions to the extreme, using a technique that is actually very simple: the frame - of the windshield or the window - within the frame - of the camera.

For the 2012 Maneqquin series, Friedlander rescues his 35mm Leica. This time he returns to the cities of New York and Los Angeles and plays once more with the reflections of the buildings and the pedestrians in the shop windows. Inside these, one or more mannequins are displayed in different poses, almost as if they were models of flesh and blood. Despite the chosen theme, these images should not be considered an explicit criticism of consumerism, nor a copy of previous photographs, but a reflection on his work, something that, on the other hand, Friedlander constantly does, so that the viewer also reflects with the.