Vincent Borrelli, Bookseller

Lee Friedlander: The New Cars 1964 [SIGNED]

FRIEDLANDER, Lee, FRAENKEL, Jeffrey

Publisher: San Francisco: Fraenkel Gallery, 2011
Edition: 1st Edition
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 9781881337317
Condition: New / No dust jacket as issued
Item #: 112169

$175.00

Specifics

Please inquire. Pricing and availability are subject to change (price is net to all; promotional discounts do not apply).

First edition, first printing. Signed by Friedlander. Hardcover. Full blue leatherette-covered boards with offset reproduction mounted on the front cover; with title in silver and gold on cover and spine; no dust jacket as issued. Photographs by Friedlander. Introduction by Jeffrey Fraenkel. Includes an illustrated list of plates. Designed by Katy Homans. Unpaginated (72 pp.), with 33 plates, plus 3 four-color reproductions and 32 additional black-and-white reproductions for the list of plates, printed by Meridian Printing, East Greenwich, Rhode Island, from separations made by Thomas Palmer. 9-3/4 x 12 inches.

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

New (from Friedlander's personal archive).

Description

From the publisher: "In 1964, two young art directors at Harper's Bazaar named Ruth Ansel and Bea Feitler hired the then up-and-coming photographer Lee Friedlander to photograph the much-anticipated new car models of that year. Friedlander's jazz album covers had proven he knew how to work on assignment, and Ansel and Feitler realized that if Bazaarwas to obtain the photographer's best work he should be let alone to make it. It's difficult now to comprehend how anticipated next year's cars were to Americans of the 1960s, but if Friedlander was aware of this, the photographs he delivered (on time) don't betray it. Rather than depicting the cars in seductive locales, he had them delivered to parking lots near burger joints, cheap furniture stores, downscale beauty parlors and--most ignominiously of all--a used-car lot. As Friedlander says, “I just put the cars out in the world, instead of on a pedestal.” The magazine's editor-in-chief was unamused, fearing that the photographs would deter car manufacturers from advertising in Harper's, so Friedlander was paid for his work and the photographs were soon forgotten--until he stumbled across them in 2010. Even a cursory study of this project reveals a compendium of strategies that would soon bring Friedlander acclaim and wreak havoc with widely accepted notions of what constituted a good photograph. Now, the Continentals, Eldorados and Mercury Meteors of 1964 have their day in this beautifully produced volume."