Lee Friedlander Framed

In his selection of 70 photographs by Lee Friedlander, acclaimed filmmaker Joel Coen focuses on Friedlander’s wonderfully strange sense of composition. In Lee Friedlander’s inimitable style, the images are strange and visually dense, bisected and sculpted by stop signs and utility poles, shop windows and reflections, car doors and windscreens or shadows and trees. ‘As a filmmaker, I liked the idea of creating a sequence that would highlight Lee’s unusual approach to framing, namely his splitting, splintering, repeating, fracturing and grouping of elements into new and impossible compositions,’ writes Coen; b/w photos.

Featuring work spanning more than 60 years, the book includes selections from some of Friedlander’s most famous series, including The American Monument, America by Car, The Little Screens and others, organised to make connections between form and composition rather than subject. In an afterword, acclaimed actor Frances McDormand describes the bond between the two artists. Coen and Friedlander ‘contain mysteries that seem somewhat related,’ she writes. ‘They capture and fill frames with sometimes simple and sometimes chaotic images that make us all wonder.’