LONDON.- Timothy Taylor Gallery presents an exhibition of recent work by the influential and critically acclaimed American photographer Lee Friedlander, on display for the first time in the UK. This will be Friedlanderʼs first solo exhibition in London since his 1976 show at the Photographersʼ Gallery.
Lee Friedlander: America By Car charts numerous journeys made by the photographer during the last decade across most of the fifty US states. Shot entirely from the interiors of rental cars, typically from the driver’s seat, Friedlander makes use of side and rearview mirrors, windscreens, and side windows as framing devices for a total of 192 images.
In America By Car, Friedlander uses the quintessential icons of US culture – cars and the open road – to explore contemporary America, revisiting in the process many of the places and strategies that he has incorporated into his practice throughout his career.
Elements from car interiors such as steering wheels and dashboards, as well as leather or wood panel trim, provide an index of their own; these differing qualities of finish and contemporaneity often appear strikingly at odds with the terrains in which they are located. Presented in the square-crop format that characterizes Friedlander’s more recent work, these images complicate and invigorate the most bereft of rural scenes. His desire to collapse and flatten out the three dimensional world parallels the means of cubist painting and recalls the collaging techniques of pop art.
In a career spanning over fifty years, Friedlander is renowned for his recordings of everyday phenomena in works that he describes as ‘American social landscapes’. First coming to prominence after exhibiting alongside fellow photographers Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus in John Szarkowski’s New Documents exhibition at MoMA, New York in 1967, Friedlander has been instrumental in the medium of photography’s acceptance as a significant 20th century art form.
Lee Friedlander: America By Car was shown in its entirety at The Whitney Museum of American Art, 4 September – 28 November 2010 and was organized by Elisabeth Sussman, the Whitney’s Curator of Photography.
Lee Friedlander was born in Aberdeen, Washington in 1934 and was introduced to photography at the age of fourteen. After shooting album cover portraits of Jazz musicians in New York and New Orleans, he began freelance commercial work in the late 1950s.
Among his numerous awards are a MacArthur Foundation Award, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and three Guggenheim Fellowships. Friedlander has published over twenty books beginning with the groundbreaking Self Portraits in 1970, and including American Musicians (1976), Lee Friedlander at work (2002), and Sticks and Stones: Architectural America (2004). Friedlander was the subject of a major traveling exhibition organized by MoMA in 2005, as well as being the 25th Hasselblad Award Winner the same year.
