|
|
|
Fraenkel Gallery
|
In 1964, two young art directors at Harper's Bazaar named Ruth Ansel and Bea Feitler hired the then up-and-coming photographer Lee Friedlander to photograph the much-anticipated new car models of that year. Friedlander's jazz album covers had proven he knew how to work on assignment, and Ansel and Feitler realized that if Bazaar was to obtain the photographer's best work he should be let alone to make it. It's difficult now to comprehend how anticipated next year's cars were to Americans of the 1960s, but if Friedlander was aware of this, the photographs he delivered (on time) don't betray it. Rather than depicting the cars in seductive locales, he had them delivered to parking lots near burger joints, cheap furniture stores, downscale beauty parlors and — most ignominiously of all — a used-car lot. As Friedlander says, I just put the cars out in the world, instead of on a pedestal. The magazine's editor-in-chief was unamused, fearing that the photographs would deter car manufacturers from advertising in Harper's, so Friedlander was paid for his work and the photographs were soon forgotten — until he stumbled across them in 2010. Even a cursory study of this project reveals a compendium of strategies that would soon bring Friedlander acclaim and wreak havoc with widely accepted notions of what constituted a good photograph. Now, the Continentals, Eldorados and Mercury Meteors of 1964 have their day in this beautifully produced volume. |
|
Lee Friedlander is one of the few artists in any medium to have sustained a body of influential work over five decades. To make the photographs in Mannequin, he returned to the hand-held, 35-mm camera that he used in the earliest decades of his career. Over the past three years, Friedlander has roamed the sidewalks of New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco, focusing on storefront windows and reflections that conjure marketplace notions of sex, fashion and consumerism, while recalling Atget's surreal photographs of Parisian windows made 100 years earlier. Thoroughly straightforward, their unsettling and radical new compositions suggest photographs that have been torn up and pasted back together again in near-random ways. Lee Friedlander (born 1934) first came to public attention in the landmark exhibition New Documents, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1967. The range of his work since then-including portraits, nudes, still lifes and studies of people at work-is anchored in a uniquely vivid and far-reaching vision of the american scene. More than 40 books about his work have been published since the early 1970s, including Self-Portrait, Sticks and Stones, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan, Family, America by Car, People at Work and The New Cars 1964. His career was the focus of a major traveling retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art in 2005. His work can be found in depth in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art, among many others. |
|
