"I found it a daunting task to choose just a few images from Lee Friedlander's vast career. Where to start...?" –Joel Coen
In his selection of 70 photographs by Lee Friedlander, acclaimed filmmaker Joel Coen focuses on Friedlander’s beautifully strange sense of composition, in which images are off kilter and visually dense, bisected and carved by stop signs and utility poles, store windows and reflections, car doors and windshields or shadows and trees. "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," Coen writes. Featuring work spanning more than 60 years, the book includes selections from some of Friedlander’s most celebrated series, including The American Monument, America by Car, The Little Screens and others, arranged to draw connections between form and composition rather than subject. In an afterword, renowned actor Frances McDormand describes the bond between the two artists: "they both capture and fill frames with sometimes simple and other times chaotically elaborate images that cause us all to wonder."
Lee Friedlander (born 1934) began photographing in 1948. Among his more than 50 monographs are Signs, Sticks and Stones, Self-Portrait, Letters from the People, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan and At Work. His work was included in the influential 1967 exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski.
Joel Coen (born 1954) is an American filmmaker who, with his younger brother Ethan, has directed films such as Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, True Grit, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man and Hail Caesar.
