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Self Portrait: Photographs by Lee Friedlander (Special Limited Edition with 2 Vintage Gelatin Silver Prints)

Publisher: New City, New York: Haywire Press, 1970
Edition: 1st Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: As New / No dust jacket as issued
Item #: 112033

$10,000.00

Specifics

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Special limited edition of 100 signed and numbered copies, plus 20 artist's copies, with two vintage gelatin silver prints: 1) "Tallahassee, Florida. 1969" (cover image of the trade edition). Image 3-7/16 inches x 5-3/16 inches, mounted on cloth cover of the book; and 2) "Wilmington, Delaware. 1965" (pl. 23 in the trade edition), mounted and bound in following the title page. Signed and numbered in pencil on recto of mount beneath image. Image 6-7/8 x 4-3/8 inches; mount 8-1/2 x 9 inches. Edition is housed in a gray paper-covered slipcase.

ABOUT THE BOOK: First edition, first printing. Signed by Friedlander. Hardcover. Black cloth-covered boards, with gelatin silver print mounted on the cover; no dust jacket as issued (for the Special Limited Edition). Photographs and text (untitled preface) by Friedlander. Designed by Friedlander and Marvin Israel. Unpaginated (90 pp. including bound-in print) with 42 plates plus the cover image (not reproduced inside the book), printed by the Meriden Gravure Company, Meriden, Connecticut, from duotone separations made by Richard Benson. 8-1/2 x 9-1/8 inches. [Cited in Andrew Roth, ed., The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century. (New York: PPP Editions in association with Roth Horowitz LLC, 2001), in Andrew Roth, ed., The Open Book. (Göteborg, Sweden: Hasselblad Center in association with Steidl Verlag, Göttingen, Germany, 2004), and in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, Volume I. (London and New York: Phaidon, 2004).] [See: Peter Galassi, Friedlander. (New York: MoMA, 2005), "Books, Special Editions, and Portfolios" (pp. 444-459), #4.]

Lee Friedlander’s work is widely known for transforming our visual understanding of contemporary American culture. Known for passionately embracing all subject matter, Friedlander photographed nearly every facet of American life from the 1950s to the present. From factories in Pennsylvania, to the jazz scene in New Orleans, to the deserts of the Southwest, Friedlander's complex formal visual strategies continue to influence the way we understand, analyze, and experience modern American experience. Friedlander's work continues to influence photographic practice internationally, in part due to the heightened sense of self-awareness that is a trademark of so many of his photographs and in part because of his ability to embrace wide-ranging subject matter, always interpreting it in an elegance that hadn't existed prior to his work.

Condition

As New (from Friedlander's personal archive).

Description

Friedlander's Self-Portraits call attention to the complex, fractured and sometimes dissimulating interplay between various screens, shadows, reflections, lenses and the surfaces of the photographs themselves. Introducing this body of work, Friedlander wrote, "I might call myself an intruder." Following this, in Andrew Roth's Book of 101 Books Vince Aletti asserts, "Friedlander does seem to be lurking or barging into his own pictures -- a hovering, disembodied Everyman, at once here and gone. Like the ephemeral figures in nineteenth-century spirit photos, he appears as a shadow, a reflection, a pair of shoes, a barely discernible shape. Although there are a number of shots where Friedlander's head is clearly visible in a mirror or looms unmediated into the frame, none are conventional or in any sense flattering self-portraits...Mostly, however, he seems determined to remove himself from the frame -- to become not the subject of the picture but just another incidental bit of photographic phenomena, no more important that a shaft of sunlight or a shop window or a passing shadow."