20thC; Friedlander Lee

Black and white photograph taken through the window of a furniture store. Reflections in the window are overlayed with the bed and other furnishings inside the shop.

Copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Lee Friedlander received his first public recognition from his portraits of jazz musicians which he began to produce while in Los Angeles in 1954. He moved to New York in 1956, working mainly for Atlantic Records. During the late 1950s and early 1960s Friedlander was absorbing the work of photographers such as Robert Frank (The Americans was published in 1959) and the work of Atget which he saw at Walker Evans’s home. Friedlander also met his contemporaries Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus when he moved to New York. Like Winogrand and Arbus, Friedlander was producing street photographs at this time and their work was brought together in a show at MoMA in 1967 entitled ‘New Documents’. Although these photographers had a strong effect on each other’s work, they differed in concept and intent. Winogrand and Arbus, generally speaking, chose subject matter which was inherently demanding, at times bizarre, while Friedlander concentrated on commonplace objects, the meaning of which is elusive. His images create an uncommon understanding of the ordinary objects. Friedlander’s street photographs, produced in the 1960s (including this image), form the body of his work that has received the most attention. It constitutes, however, only a fraction of his output. Over the last twenty-five years he has worked continuously on commissioned projects and there are many publications of his photographs. He has produced, for example, self-portraits, nudes, images of people in their working environment, portraits and landscapes in Japan and Egypt.

Lee Friedlander is best known for his street photographs taken in the United States during the 1960s. Here his choice of a shop window as subject matter refers to the photographs of Parisian shopfronts taken by Eugène Atget at the turn of the 20th century. With this relationship in mind, the image might be read as a value-free document of a shop window. It could, however, also refer to Atget’s adoption by the Surrealist movement as the ‘father’ of uncanny images of street objects and architecture. The image is also partly a self-portrait; Friedlander produced a series of self-portraits around this time, some of which showed him reflected in windows and shopfronts. In the centre of the image, just below and to the right of the ‘cashier’ sign, a silhouette and three fingers poised on a camera are just visible.

PH.769-1980