BOOK: Lee Friedlander-Framed, Fraenkel Gallery

Lee Friedlander began photographing the American social landscape in 1948. With an ability to organize a vast amount of visual information in dynamic compositions, Friedlander has made humorous and poignant images among the chaos of city life or in dense natural landscapes, focusing on countless subjects ranging from cars and trees to monuments and nudes. In conjunction with the exhibition opening May 6, Fraenkel Gallery presents a new monograph, “Lee Friedlander Framed” by Joel Coen. Through an inspired selection of 70 photographs, the monograph “Lee Friedlander Framed” acclaimed filmmaker Joel Coen focuses on Friedlander’s beautifully strange sense of composition. Featuring work made over a 60-year span, the book includes many little-known images interwoven with more celebrated ones, sequenced cinematically to draw connections between form and composition rather than subject. Coen’s selection focuses on photographs that are dense and off-kilter, often bisected by stop signs and utility poles, car doors and windshields, trees and shadows. “As a filmmaker, I liked the idea of creating a sequence that would highlight Lee’s unusual approach to framing—his splitting, splintering, repeating, fracturing, and reassembling elements into new and impossible compositions.-Dimitris Lempesis