Opening: Thursday, 3 September, 6–9 PM
Zander Galerie Paris is delighted to announce its upcoming exhibition showcasing a special selection of ten photographs by acclaimed American photographer Lee Friedlander. Taken and printed by the artist in the 1960s and 1970s, these rare vintage gelatin silver prints offer a compelling look into Friedlander’s vision of the American way of life. Created during a defining period of his career, the works reveal the visual wit, acute observation, and formal complexity that have made him one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century.
Born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1934, Lee Friedlander is widely regarded as a pioneer of American social landscape photography. Drawing on the legacy of Walker Evans, yet forging a radically personal visual language, Friedlander transformed the documentary tradition into an exploration of perception itself. In 1967, John Szarkowski selected Lee Friedlander’s photographs, alongside Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, for the landmark exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This exhibition of post-war photography reshaped the understanding of the documentary practice. For more than six decades, Friedlander has chronicled the fabric of everyday life in the US and beyond: its streets, storefronts, automobiles, signs and passers-by, revealing how ordinary urban environments mirror broader social and cultural realities. Through numerous museum exhibitions and publications, his work has profoundly influenced generations of photographers and established a new vocabulary for subjective documentary photography.
The ten works presented in this exhibition exemplify the visual strategies that define Friedlander’s practice. Rather than recording reality objectively, Friedlander embraces its ambiguities, allowing multiple levels of space and meaning to coexist within a single frame. Although the photographs often evoke the immediacy of snapshots, each image is built upon a remarkably sophisticated composition, in which layered perspectives of reflections, shadows, windows, mirrors, and signage converge into dense yet carefully orchestrated image fields. The black-and-white gelatin silver prints reinforce this interplay of surfaces and forms, flattening visual hierarchies while graphic structures emerge. Faces disappear behind advertising posters, passers-by seem to merge with reflections in shop windows, landscapes appear unexpectedly in rear-view mirrors, and the photographer himself occasionally enters the image through his own reflection. Oscillating between humour and formal rigour, these photographs transform the chaos of everyday urban life, inviting viewers to reconsider the familiar through Friedlander’s singular gaze.
Lee Friedlander’s work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Haus der Kunst, Munich; and Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid. His photographs are held in leading public collections worldwide, including at the Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; Fotomuseum Winterthur; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including Guggenheim Fellowships, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography.
