Lee Friedlander  (American, 1934) 

Lee Friedlander (American, b.1934) is a photographer best known for his long career in documenting the American social landscape. After studying photography under Edward Kaminski at the Art Center of Los Angeles, he moved to New York and photographed jazz musicians for record jackets. Influenced by legendary street photographers such as Eugène Atget (French, 1957–1927), Walker Evans (American, 1903–1975), and Robert Frank (American, b.1924), Friedlander produced series that sought to capture urban life while playing with spatial depth, reflections, and shadows. For his 1976 series The American Monument, Friedlander presents a fragmentary vision of over 100 public monuments, and three years later he documented industry and factory workers in Factory Valleys: Ohio and Pennsylvania. Continuing his interest in a fragmentary approach to photographic composition, his series Self-Portrait shows Friedlander in the form of reflections or shadows. His close connection with popular culture and Pop Art appears in Works from the Same House, a collaboration with Jim Dine (American, b.1935) that juxtaposed Friedlander's photographs with Dine's etchings. Friedlander received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1990 and the Hasselblad International Award in 2005. His first solo show was at the International Museum of Photography in 1963, and his work was part of John Szarkowski's (American, b.1925) New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967. Recent retrospectives were presented in 2005 at the Museum of Modern Art, and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2008.