Lee Friedlander was born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1934, and has been one of the most inventive and productive artists in the history of photography. For more than five decades he has revisited in a prolific and magisterial way the genre of the self-portrait. More intrusive and introspective, his self-portraits are inflected through a play of shadows, reflections, and fragmentations. Facing the camera or camera in hand, in his photographs we see his image rise up, impose itself, position itself, fold up, refract itself. The Self Portrait series includes his first book, published by Haywire Press in 1970, added to which was a monograph edited by Fraenkel Gallery in 2000. The series extends up to the Yale University album published in 2011, which gathers several hundreds of original self-portraits. We have accompanied this famous photographer as the years have taken their course. His creative life and his private life have unfolded and become entangled with one another. Conceived as the follow up to In the Picture Self-Portraits 1958-2011, Lee Friedlander’s latest opus, Family in the Picture, 1958-2013, is Lee’s family album. A collection of more than 350 photographs, it begins with images of Maria Friedlander, taken as they embarked on their first years of life together.
The exhibition Lee Friedlander, Self and Familyis organized around these two publications, with the generous support of the Fraenkel Gallery of San Francisco. It coincides with the publication Family in the Picture 1958-2013 by Yale University Press in cooperation with the Fondation A Stichting.
