Self-portrait © Lee Friedlander. Courtesy Janet Borden Inc., New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Lee Friedlander, who has chronicled the American social landscape for more than forty years, was born in the mill town of Aberdeen, Washington, in 1934. He came to prominence in the late 1960s and 1970s as a contemporary of such artists as Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand, Richard Avedon, and Diane Arbus. His photographs, taken in small towns and big cities across the country, are revealing documents of labor, home life, and public places. He currently lives and works in the New York City area.

Friedlander first studied photography under Edward Kaminski at the Art Center School in Los Angeles (1953-55), and moved soon thereafter to New York. He served as a commercial photographer in the late 1950s, freelancing for magazines and photographing covers for jazz albums in New York and New Orleans. Working for publications such as Esquire, Holiday, Art in America, Seventeen, and Sports Illustrated, Friedlander learned to balance commercial and aesthetic demands.

During this period, he also met a number of documentary photographers, including Walker Evans, whose work had a major influence on Friedlander. Supported by two Guggenheim Fellowships (awarded in 1960 and 1962), he began recording the shifting environments and deep ironies of American life-working in the South and Southeast in addition to New York City-even as he continued to freelance for commercial entities.

The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, presented Friedlander's first individual exhibition in 1963, and in 1967 his work was included in the groundbreaking exhibition New Documents, curated by John Szarkowski, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. His first book, Self Portrait, was self-published in 1970.

Friedlander has been exceptionally influential and widely exhibited, with more than seventy individual exhibitions in the past forty years. A 2005 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, organized by MoMA department of photography chief curator Peter Galassi, has been one of Friedlander's most comprehensive presentations to date. The exhibition was accompanied by a major book entitled Friedlander, published by MoMA.

Friedlander's photographs are in the collections of the International Center of Photography; the Art Institute of Chicago; The Baltimore Museum of Art; the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum; and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., among other international collections.

He has also published fifteen books and has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a third Guggenheim Fellowship, and four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2005 Friedlander was the recipient of the Hasselblad International Award. He is represented by Janet Borden Gallery in New York and Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco.

New York City, 1974, © Lee Friedlander. Courtesy Janet Borden, Inc., New York, and
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco