Lee Friedlander: Mannequin

Lee Friedlander is one of the few artists in any medium to have sustained a body of influential work over five decades. To make the photographs in Mannequin, he returned to the hand-held, 35-mm camera that he used in the earliest decades of his career. Over the past three years, Friedlander has roamed the sidewalks of New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco, focusing on storefront windows and reflections that conjure marketplace notions of sex, fashion and consumerism, while recalling Atget’s surreal photographs of Parisian windows made 100 years earlier. Thoroughly straightforward, their unsettling and radical new compositions suggest photographs that have been torn up and pasted back together again in near-random ways.

Lee Friedlander (born 1934) first came to public attention in the landmark exhibition New Documents, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1967. The range of his work since then—including portraits, nudes, still lifes and studies of people at work—is anchored in a uniquely vivid and far-reaching vision of the american scene. More than 40 books about his work have been published since the early 1970s, including Self-Portrait, Sticks and Stones, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan, Family, America by Car, People at Work and The New Cars 1964. His career was the focus of a major traveling retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art in 2005. His work can be found in depth in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art, among many others.