Auction: Photographs, April 3, 2013 @Phillips New York

Phillips' upcoming various owner Photographs sale is a diverse mix, with a few eyecatchers and many more solid, middle of the road works by well known names to sift through. All in, there are a total of 141 photographs on offer, with a total High estimate of $3527500.

Here's the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 37
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $244500

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 91
Total Mid Estimate: $2073000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 13
Total High Estimate: $1210000

The top lot by High estimate is lot 177, Edward Steichen, Diagram of Doom - 2, c1922, estimated at $120000-180000 (image at right, top, via Phillips).

Here's the list of photographers represented by three or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Robert Mapplethorpe (9)
Irving Penn (7)
Peter Beard (5)
Helmut Newton (5)
Henri Cartier-Bresson (4)
Andre Kertesz (4)
Hiroshi Sugimoto (4)
Diane Arbus (3)
Lee Friedlander (3)
Horst P. Horst (3)

Other works of interest include lot 205, Irving Penn, Poppy: Showgirl, New York, 1968/1989, estimated at $50000-70000 (image at right middle, via Phillips), and lot 206, Lee Friedlander, Galax, Virginia, 1962/1960s, estimated at $30000-40000 (image at right, bottom, via Phillips).

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.

Photographs
April 3rd

Phillips
450 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10022

Lee Friedlander: Nudes @Pace

JTF (just the facts): A total of 74 black and white photographs, framed in white/black and matted, and hung against white and grey walls in the large two room gallery space. The 56 prints by Lee Friedlander are all modern gelatin silver prints, taken between 1977 and 1991. The works are sized either 11x14 or 16x20 and are uneditioned. The 9 works by Bill Brandt are vintage gelatin silver prints, each sized roughly 9x8, and taken between 1947 and 1959. The 9 works by Edward Weston are vintage gelatin silver prints, sized either 4x5 or 8x10, and taken between 1933 and 1936. (Installation shots at right. There is no photography allowed in the gallery, so the images are courtesy of the Pace/MacGill website.)

 

Comments/Context: For many years after first seeing Lee Friedlander's nudes, I had a hard time enjoying them. As I look back now, I'm not sure I ever really even saw them in some sense. They were just too hairy, too confrontationally real in a way that I found unsettling, and as a result, I didn't engage them enough. It wasn't that they were excessively aggressive or explicit exactly, but more that they seemed to fly in the face of everything I thought I knew (and valued) about the elegant photographic nude. That joltingly contrarian book (Lee Friedlander Nudes) sitting on our shelves was somehow radioactive, bursting with an energy that was too far out of control for me. I would take it down and look at it from time to time with the trepidation of handling a ticking time bomb, quickly flipping through it and putting it back before it could explode.

 

This show brings together a selection of these challenging Friedlander nudes and places them on equal footing with works by the two most important and influential photographers of the nude from the 20th century, Edward Weston and Bill Brandt. A side room plays host to this brilliant juxtaposition, teasing out the visual ideas and motifs that tie Friedlander to his predecessors. Weston's nudes turn on close in framing to create unexpected body abstractions and employ plenty of elongated lounging forms (on the famous sand) built on sinuous lines. Brandt's early pictures use shadowy interiors to host mysterious models in chairs, while later images create their magic with the bold, fragmented distortion of curves and overexposed whites. With these two sets of images as a historical backdrop and artistic foil, it's possible to carefully follow the aesthetic connections and pathways between the photographers and to pinpoint Friedlander's new and original innovations.

 

While the often disorienting twisting and turning of bodies in Friedlander's nudes certainly has parallels in both Weston and Brandt, Friedlander's approach is neither sculpted perfection nor full force abstraction. His pictures are rooted in the mundane and the everyday, in real individuals rather than dreamy ideals. Young bodies sprawl on couches and chairs with effortless ease, spread across messy beds and bent over crumpled blankets, not far from cluttered coffee tables filled with cosmetics and ashtrays. The camera spins and looms, often lingering from above or cropping out the head. His flash creates brash highlights that bounce off up-close hips, breasts and flanks, with dark hairy armpits and crotches offset by the dated patterns of woven upholstery and fringed pillows. Just when you've been distracted by the intrusion of a clip-on lamp, the interruption of a protruding window frame, or the swirl of a floral patterned bedsheet, Friedlander delivers an unexpectedly graceful curve or arched arm that takes your breath away; his nudes move back and forth between direct, honest, small apartment realism and compositionally complex formal exercises. In every picture, the casual and ordinary have been transformed into something striking, a jumble of overlapping female limbs, crowded and serenely chaotic rather than merely pared down.

 

What's most important about this exhibit is how it so successfully shows both Friedlander's respect for the past and his own one-of-a-kind rule breaking vision. There are obvious echoes of Weston and Brandt here, but those influences have been thoroughly digested, incorporated by Friedlander and then evolved in his own direction for several more iterative generations. The result is a body of work that is at once familiar and foreign, reverent and shockingly irreverent. All in, this is a show worth making a detour for. It finally led me to get over my own preconceived notions and prejudices about what the photographic nude is supposed to be, and to embrace Friedlander's nudes for the genius that they are.

 

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are generally priced based on size, with the 11x14 prints at $6800 each and the 16x20 prints at $8500 each. Outliers from this overall price pattern include the 11x14 image from the cover of the original Lee Friedlander Nudes book (at $7400) and the 16x20 images of Madonna (at $9500). Friedlander's work is routinely available in the secondary markets, with recent prices at auction ranging from roughly $2000 on the low end to as much as $80000 for his most iconic vintage prints. The Brandts (from David Dechman's collection) and Westons (from MoMA) are not for sale.

 

Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)

 

Transit Hub:

• Features/Reviews: Daily Beast (here), NY Photo Review (here)

Lee Friedlander: Nudes
Through December 22nd

Pace Gallery
32 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

Lee Friedlander: Mannequin @Pace/MacGill

JTF (just the facts): A total of 28 black and white photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung against purple and grey walls in the two room gallery space. All of the prints are gelatin silver prints made between 2009 and 2011. Each of the works is sized 18x12 and is uneditioned. A monograph of this body of work was recently published by Fraenkel Gallery (here). (Installation shots at right. There is no photography allowed in the gallery, so the images are courtesy of the Pace/MacGill website.)

Comments/Context: Few photographers can boast of having consistently subverted existing visual genres as often as Lee Friedlander has. Over the years, he has radically disassembled the self portrait, the urban scene, the architectural image, the landscape, the floral still life, and even the nude, making each uniquely and undeniably his own. In this show of recent work, Friedlander takes on a classic of street photography - the reflected storefront window - and tries to wholly reenvision a subject that Atget, Abbott, Modell and many others have justifiably made iconic.

Friedlander has long been a master of complex, overlapping, interrupted compositions, so it is not particularly surprising that he was drawn to the layered flatness offered by the alternately transparent and reflective glass of these displays. His mannequins pose with rigid style, draped in clashing reflections and repeated geometric patterns. Sleek torsos are offset by soaring modern skyscrapers and grids of stone windows, sometimes framing the body with bold lines and other times trampling all over the background figure. Areas of dark and light, brightness and shadow, invert compositions and add a double exposure effect. A few of the headless models look like they are actually dressed with buildings, city trees bursting from their heads and metal scaffolding cutting straight through their graceful figures. No one would ever mistake these shop windows for pictures made by anyone but Friedlander.

My one quibbling criticism of these otherwise well made photographs is that a few too many are a bit flat, lacking in the crackling wit that I enjoy so much about Friedlander's work. The compositions are characteristically cluttered, but I just didn't feel the same restless energy and vitality that I do with his other bodies of work. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that he hasn't been able to break the rules quite as much with this subject matter as he has been able to do with others; the Surrealists had plenty of fun with reflections like these, so Friedlander's images seem less transgressive and shocking than they normally might. He's at his best when he thoroughly upends the viewer's expectations, and these photographs only turn the chaos up a notch or two from scenes we are already familiar with. All that said, they're still a singular new riff on an old visual motif, and evidence that Friedlander's eye continues to be distinctive and exceptional.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced at $8500 each. Friedlander's work is routinely available in the secondary markets, with prices at auction ranging from approximately $2000 to as much as $80000 in recent years.

 

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

 

Transit Hub:

• Features/Reviews: Artcritical (here), New Yorker PhotoBooth (here), Le Journal de la Photographie (here)

Lee Friedlander: Mannequin

Through December 22nd

Pace/MacGill Gallery
32 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

Merry Christmas from Lee Friedlander @Borden

JTF (just the facts): A total of 48 black and white photographs, framed in dark grey and matted, and hung in the main gallery space. All of the prints are gelatin silver prints, printed 16x20 or reverse for both 35mm and square format images. The works were taken between 1963 and 2010, and the prints were made between 2003 and 2011. Friedlander does not edition his prints, so there are no edition sizes/numbers. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Given how prolific Lee Friedlander has been over his long career, it isn't particularly surprising that he can dig back into his archives and unearth groups of pictures that turn on a common theme. Just pick a visual motif, a geography, a time period, or a specific subject matter, sort out the 50 or so best or most representative, and voila, it's the makings of another book. This show uses this approach to paint an offbeat portrait of the Christmas season, gathering pictures made over five decades into a sampler of Friedlander's signature visual devices, each with a holiday twist.

While there is an entire review to be written here about rotting garlands, tired paper window decorations, insanely over-the-top front lawns, broken roadsigns, and snowless dirty holiday cheer, and about what Friedlander might be pointing out about our uniquely American Christmas celebrations (wryly cynical or understatedly optimistic?), I was actually struck more by Friedlander's toolbox of photographic techniques than by his underlying commentary. Fresh from his Whitney show, there are Santas framed by rental car interiors and decorated with side mirror picture-in-picture reflections. Another set of photographs uses the empty beds of pickup trucks as a spatial device, adding angles and distance to decorations in windows and on middle distance house fronts. Telephone poles (complete with imitation greenery on top) make repeated appearances, dividing compositions. Storefront window displays enable multiple layers of refractions, mixing the staged scenes of the items for sale (look for the S&M Santa) with echoes of nearby street decor. Even chain link fence dividers and shadow self portraits are thrown in with oddly fashionable nativity scenes and West Texas holiday sidewalks.

Sure, there is something off kilter or quietly strange about each of these Christmas adornments; but there is more here than found tinsel, trashy blow-up lawn ornaments, wreaths on solar panels, and audaciously pedestrian baubles and gewgaws. These are extremely well made photographs that capture a tiny bit of Christmas spirit in the midst of making a much more complicated and mature artistic statement. Only Lee Friedlander takes a street scene covered in fuzzy faux trees, interrupts it with a telephone pole, and uses the pane of a phone booth to frame the people on the far corner, or uses skewed iron railings, front stoop stairs, and overflowing garbage cans to tell a chaotic visual story about Christmas in Brooklyn. Every single picture has visual pyrotechnics and hidden Christmas jokes to unpack, so take your time and savor these holiday eccentricities.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced at $8500 each. Friedlander's work is routinely available in the secondary markets, with prices at auction ranging from approximately $2000 to as much as $80000 in recent years.

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: WSJ (here), Time LightBox (here)

Merry Christmas from Lee Friedlander
Through December 31st

Janet Borden, Inc.
560 Broadway
New York, NY 10012

Auction: Photographs, May 10, 2011 @Bonhams

Bonhams' various owner Photographs sale in two weeks has a deeper selection of Sugimoto prints than we've seen at auction anywhere this year. The top seven lots in the sale are all Sugimotos, including a solid mix of seascapes and blurred architecture images; another four Sugimotos can be found down the estimate list a little further. Overall, there are 170 photographs on offer, with a total High estimate of $1283600.
Here's the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 139
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $673600
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Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 31
Total Mid Estimate: $610000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 0
Total High Estimate: NA

The top lot by High estimate is tied between two lots: lot 122, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Colors of Shadow C1018, 2006, and lot 123, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Colors of Shadow C1027, 2006, (image at right, top, via Bonhams), both at $30000-50000.
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Below is the list of photographers represented by 4 or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Ansel Adams (13)
Hiroshi Sugimoto (11)
Lee Friedlander (8)
Edward Curtis (7)
Alfred Eisenstaedt (6)
Joel Meyerowitz (5)
Richard Misrach (5)
Peter Beard (4)
Andre Kertesz (4)
Michael Light (4)
Irving Penn (4)
Sandy Skoglund (4)
Joel-Peter Witkin (4)

(Lot 89, Lee Friedlander, Stems, 1994, at $3000-4000, image at right, middle, and lot 131, Richard Misrach, Plate 4 from Desert Night Series, 1977, at $5000-7000, image at right, bottom, both via Bonhams.)
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The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.

Photographs
May 10th
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Bonhams
580 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10022

Auction: Crossing America: Photographs from the Consolidated Freightways Collection, Part I, April 7, 2011 @Christie's

We've had a copy of the mid 1980s catalog of the Consolidated Freightways photography collection on our bookshelves for many years now. I've always thought that it was a smart and understated corporate collection: starting with a meaningful connection to the business itself (American, involved in transportation, trucking, highways, roads etc.), it expanded its visual and aesthetic boundaries to include a wide variety of relevant photography, from architectural images and city scenes, to street photography and Western landscapes, starting in the 1920s (the founding of the company) and continuing up to the present. The collection mixes the well known and the lesser known, takes some chances, and ends up with a distinctive personality, rather than being a bland compendium of the obvious and the politically correct. Overall, Part I of the sale includes 130 photographs, with a total High estimate of $1404000.

Here's the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 100

Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $630000

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 28
Total Mid Estimate: $614000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 2
Total High Estimate: $160000

The top lot by High estimate is lot 293, Robert Mapplethorpe, Flag, 1987, at $70000-90000.

Here's the complete list of photographers represented by three or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Berenice Abbott (5)

Harry Callahan (5)
Dorothea Lange (5)
Garry Winogrand (5)
Bruce Davidson (4)
Lee Friedlander (4)
Robert Adams (4)
Ansel Adams (3)
Diane Arbus (3)
Roy DeCarava (3)
Walker Evans (3)
Robert Frank (3)
Ralph Eugene Meatyard (3)
Ray K. Metzker (3)
Hiroshi Sugimoto (3)

(Lot 230, Lee Friedlander, Newark, 1963, at $10000-15000, at right, top, lot275, Harry Callahan, New York, 1976, at $6000-8000, at right, bottom, and lot 288, Lewis Baltz, Lemmon Valley, Looking Northeast, 1977, at $7000-9000, at right, middle, all via Christie's.)

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here. The eCatalogue is located here.

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Crossing America: Photographs from the Consolidated Freightways Collection, Part I

April 7th

Christie's

20 Rockefeller Plaza

New York, NY 10020

Lee Friedlander: America By Car @Whitney

JTF (just the facts): A total of 192 black and white works, framed in white and matted, and double hung nearly edge to edge in a pair of adjoining gallery spaces on the fifth floor mezzanine level of the museum (down the back stairs). All of the works are gelatin silver prints, 16x20 framed square, and made between 1992 and 2009. There are 65 images in the first room and 127 in the second room. A monograph of this project has recently been published by DAP/Fraenkel (here). The Whitney does not allow photography in the galleries, so unfortunately, there are no installation shots of this show. The single images at right are taken from the Whitney website. (Lee Friedlander, Texas, 2006, at right.)

Comments/Context: As I came down the stairs into the funky, low ceilinged mezzanine space at the Whitney and got a first glimpse of the newest Friedlander show, I couldn't help but chuckle. Once again, the prolific Friedlander seems to have gotten his way - it's a densely packed installation of more pictures than any other normal photographer would dare to hang in such a cramped space.

What I found most interesting about this particular body of new work is that it feels a little like a victory lap. Friedlander has gone back out on the road, traveled through the truck stops and big cities of this great land once again, and made pictures of nearly all the same subjects he covered earlier in his career. There are mountain and desert landscapes, images of monuments, chaotic urban cityscapes, witty jokes made from vernacular architecture and roadside signage, self-portraits, and angular juxtapositions of abstract geometries in flat picture planes. There's even some chain link fence for those of you who want to go back to the early 1960s.

The difference here is that he has upended this personal retrospective by making each and every one of these pictures through the obstructed window of his rental car. Not content to make the same pictures twice, he has given himself a new challenge, with a new set of aesthetic mechanisms to break up his vision. The features of the cars provide him with a variety of complex compositional tools: square frames, borders, and dark slashing lines (from the car frame itself), sinuous curves (from the steering wheel and molded plastic dashboards), and picture in picture effects (from the reflections in the side mirrors, echoing a similar motif from the 1960s). Friedlander uses these structural devices to create additional disorienting layers of juxtapositions and perspectives that make the old subjects new again. (Lee Friedlander, Montana, 2008, at right.)

The show itself is carefully sequenced into loose groups of common subject matter that flow into one another. Stop signs become broad landscapes, which become road signs, which become portraits, which become industrial views, which become echoes of circles, which become trucks, which become roadside memorials, and so on and so on. Patterns repeat and replicate, blossoming into new ideas that morph once again. The commonality of the framing device becomes a bit monotonous across so many images, but it is altogether amazing that Friedlander can take such a simple, almost boring idea (pictures taken through the car window) and explode it into something so multi-faceted and original. His voracious eye takes the organizing principle and then extends it to its limits, creating an entirely new vocabulary out of the obvious. He does all this with impressively consistent joy; jokes, puns and ironies are to be unpacked and discovered everywhere.

Overall, I think this is a highly accessible and likeable body of work, that entertains on the surface and rewards a deeper and more thoughtful examination. The crowded rooms were full of "did you see that one?", "look over here" and smiling pointed fingers, from school groups and adults alike, all equally fascinated to see the world through Friedlander's restless eyes.

Collector's POV: Of course, none of the images in this museum show are for sale. See our review of the recent Friedlander gallery show at Mary Boone (here) for details about current price levels. As a reminder, Friedlander is represented by Janet Borden in New York (here) and Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco (here). (Lee Friedlander, Alaska, 2007, at right, via the Whitney website.)

Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times (here), New Yorker Photo Booth (here), Wall Street Journal (here), Vanity Fair (here)

Lee Friedlander: America By Car

Through November 28th

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Whitney Museum of American Art

945 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10021

Lee Friedlander: Recent Western Landscape @Boone

JTF (just the facts): A total of 65 black and white photographs, framed in blond wood and matted, and hung against mottled grey walls in the main gallery space and a smaller side gallery (44 prints in the main room and 21 in the side room). All of the works are recent gelatin silver prints on 20x16 paper, framed square. The images were taken between 2008 and 2009 in California, New Mexico, Wyoming and other Western locations and are uneditioned. An exhibition catalog is available from the gallery. The show was curated by Klaus Kertess. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: If you were to take a representative sample of traditional landscape photography greatness and compare these chestnuts with Lee Friedlander's recent landscapes, I think the most reasonable conclusion would be that Friedlander, even at his advanced age, is a bomb-throwing, rule-breaking subversive. His pictures disregard nearly every landscape convention and cliche on the books, throwing away the heroic long view, trading it for claustrophobic immersion in the roughness of the land.

While Friedlander's landscapes might be thought of as the anti-Ansel Adams (a thorough rejection of prettied-up grandeur), they remain rooted in a deep sense of American love of nature. His images have the immediacy of walking on foot, of bushwhacking through endless thickets and catching a glimpse of something glorious in the distance. They are human scaled, independent, self-sufficient, reminiscent of what you might have really encountered on a day hike with Muir, or Thoreau, or Whitman.

In general, this body of work seems like a logical extension from The Desert Seen and Apples and Olives; there is a similar aesthetic on display, just applied to different subject matter on the ground. Nearly every image is some kind of blocked view, often with some specimen shrub right in front, poking its twiggy fingers right in your eye. The view is constantly frustrated, obstructed, obfuscated, to the point that we feel hemmed in, trapped by the forest, attacked at every angle by layers of trees and underbrush; perhaps we have forgotten how to feel comfortable in these natural surroundings. And yet there is a graceful elegance to these all-over compositions, the feeling of really being there and letting go a bit, becoming involved rather than watching safely from afar, seeing the beauty of the overlooked details - the tree bark, the leaves, the delicate snow cover.

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And then for just a fraction of a second, a glimpse of mountains appears in the distance, screened off by the branches. It's a double-edged moment: maybe it reminds us that all the effort of scrabbling through the inhospitable bush was worthwhile, that the land is indeed amazing, or maybe those mountains are just Friedlander's irreverent joke, a reminder that his pictures are anything but traditionally grand. I think the pictures can be read both ways: both intensely, dirt in your shoes human, and entirely ironic.
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A few quick thoughts on the show details. In many ways, the polished floor, dimmed lighting, hushed tone venue of Mary Boone seems like a mismatch for these pictures; the photographs are brash, full of life and in your face; they'd do just as well against a rough brick wall or plywood paneling, with a raucous, energetic, expressive conversation going on in the background. As always with the prolific Friedlander, there are a few too many images on view (the side room doesn't add much to what is already on display in the main gallery), and some tighter editing might have made the effect a bit stronger; the straight-line hanging encourages the pictures to blend together a bit too much. And finally, I think some of these works would be truly mind-blowing if they were enlarged to massive scale (say 40x40).

All in, Friedlander has once again demonstrated that he has an immense reserve of originality, and can find an innovative point of view for nearly every photographic genre. In these works, he has expertly deconstructed the landscape, reconnected to the perspective from the ground, and found satisfaction in the first-hand experience of being altogether insignificant.
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Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced at $8500 each, which represents another step up in gallery pricing for Freidlander's newest work. Friedlander is represented by Janet Borden in New York (here) and Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco (here).

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A wide variety of his images are routinely available in the secondary markets, ranging in recent years from as little as $2000 to as much as $80000; at the low end of the price range, one can find later prints, broken up portfolios and lesser known images, and at the high end, vintage prints of his most recognizable images from the 1960s and early 1970s.
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Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Related books: The Desert Seen (here), Apples and Olives (here)

Lee Friedlander: Recent Western Landscape

Through October 23rd
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Mary Boone Gallery

745 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10151

Lee Friedlander: Still Life 2 @Borden

JTF (just the facts): A total of 44 black and white images, framed in black/dark grey and matted, and hung in the main gallery space. For the most part, the specs on the prints are exactly the same as the previous show, but we have repeated the details here for the sake of completeness. All of the prints are gelatin silver prints, either 11x14 or 16x20 (or reverse); there are 4 in the smaller size and 40 in the larger size on display. All of the works were taken between 1999 and 2009, most in the past few years, and the prints were generally made in the same year as the negative was taken; Friedlander does not edition his prints, so there are no edition sizes/numbers for these works. For the most part, the images were taken either in New City or in New York city, with a variety of other locations in and around the United States represented as well. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: It is my guess that there are very few (if any) artists in recent years who have created so much new work that they have merited taking back to back exhibition slots at a prominent New York gallery, but the prolific Lee Friedlander has done it with this unusual double play. The first part of this show last December was one of our top photography shows of 2009 (here), so I have been avidly looking forward to seeing part two to see what other tricks Friedlander has up his sleeve.

In contrast to the amplified effects of the previous show, this exhibit has a much more subdued and subtle feeling. While there is another selection of shop window reflections on display, these works are less slashingly chaotic and confrontational; for the most part, the scantily clad mannequins have been exchanged for oriental carpets, spools of thread and fabric bolts, New York city tourist trinkets, and elaborate cakes. The signature flattened picture plane and overlapping reflections are ever present, but the overall effect is somehow less jarring. Perhaps there is a little Friedlander fatigue going on; if these same images had been shown six months from now, perhaps I would have seen them with fresher eyes.

A second set of works center on Friedlander's own bookshelves and the tabletop displays of family photographs and personal memorabilia in his home. Elementary school pictures of children and grandchildren are clustered amidst the books, overlapping and mixed together with a Polaroid of Friedlander with Bill Clinton, a post card of Tina Turner, a sheet of postage stamps of Ella Fitzgerald, and the words "best grandpa". There is also a layer of intellectual voyeurism here, achieved by considering which great novels have been selected and saved by the photographer over the years. This is a much quieter and more personal view of the artist than we have seen before, and one that is clearly steeped in the passing of time. But these images are less recognizable as signature Friedlander, as the jolting compression and abstraction of the picture plane is meaningfully less pronounced.
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A third group of pictures uses flowers and plants as its main subject matter. Several of these works take a straight top down view of the flowers in vases, using the shadows of the window frames and nearby Adirondack chairs to create additional patterns and intersecting lines. While the rest of the vegetation images are a jumble of intertwined plant types, these unexpected bird's eye floral views are something we haven't seen before; they're an unusual motif we'd like to see Friedlander explore more deeply and exaggerate even further.
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My favorite picture in this show doesn't fit into any of these neat groups. It mixes fishing tackle (lures, weights, and gloves thrown onto a piece of plywood) with a shadow self-portrait. The plywood table bisects the picture plane, creating two layers of different depth; it's a classic Friedlander visual puzzle to be carefully unpacked.

Overall, while there are a handful of excellent pictures in this second collection, this work is less consistent than the images in the previous show. Perhaps it merely comes back to a question of editing; even when you are as talented and prolific as Friedlander is, maybe there just aren't enough astounding new pictures to fill two big gallery shows.
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Collector's POV: Once again, the prints in this show are priced at $5200 or $7400 based on size. The market for Friedlander's work has not changed in the past month, so see our previous post for details about secondary market pricing and recent auction history.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Reviews of part one: NY Times (here), DLK COLLECTION (here)

Lee Friedlander: Still Life 2
Through February 27th

Janet Borden, Inc.

560 Broadway

New York, NY 10012

Lee Friedlander: Still Life @Borden

JTF (just the facts): A total of 47 black and white images, framed in dark grey and matted, and hung in the main gallery space. All of the prints are gelatin silver prints, either 11x14 or 16x20 (or reverse); there are 5 in the smaller size and 42 in the larger size on display. All of the works were taken between 1998 and 2009, most in the past few years, and the prints were generally made in the same year as the negative was taken; Friedlander does not edition his prints, so there are no edition sizes/numbers for these works. For the most part, the images were taken in New York and California, with a variety of other locations in and around the United States represented as well. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: I visited this exhibit of Lee Friedlander's new work last week, and since then, I've been thinking hard about how to talk about the images without covering ground that has already been ably traversed by countless other reviewers, scholars and critics over the years. The truth is, it isn't easy, given the avalanche of words that have already been written, but what I can say is that this small show helped me to crystallize my own understanding of Friedlander, even after seeing the gargantuan traveling retrospective a few years ago and having a shelf full of his well-crafted books in our library.

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So let's start with a not-so-simple question to ponder: why is it that regardless of whether Friedlander has pointed his camera at a riot of chain link fence, a dense thicket of desert underbrush, an overtly hairy nude, an urban architectural scene or shop window, a jumble of flower stems in a vase, or a random vista taken through a rental car window that all of these images have the unmistakable hallmark of his artistic vision? How is it that his visual vocabulary is so original and different, so much so that his work (regardless of subject matter) is immediately recognizable? Pair with these another set of questions: why, well in to his 70s, is Friedlander still shooting so prolifically? Why doesn't he just rest on his laurels and coast into the sunset, picking up a few more lifetime achievement awards for his mantel?

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Having never met Friedlander, it is certainly presumptuous of me to try and answer these questions. But my guess is that it all comes back to a restless and relentless approach to looking, one that has been refined over the decades into a dizzying array of internal complexities and heuristics that manifest themselves as a simple flow of seeing, Friedlander-style. This is not to imply that the pictures take themselves; I'm sure that's far from the reality. But I'd like to imagine that his congested compositions coalesce in his mind's eye as a natural part of his itinerant wanderings, invisible to the rest of us who might be standing right nearby.

Friedlander's new works cover territory he has visited before, but the new pictures seem amplified somehow, as if the simple layers and overlaps of his 1960s and 1970s street scenes have been super-charged. Many of the current images are of shop windows, with an odd assortment of female mannequins and cardboard beer girls as the primary subject, many wearing various forms of swimsuits, negligees and fetish garb. Layered on top are powerful reflections of geometric buildings and street life captured in the panes of glass, creating two dimensional overlaps of transparency and shadow, pattern and interconnection. A few of the images add yet another layer of wildness via steel security grills that interrupt the view. At first glance, the clutter is a little confusing and overwhelming, but after a few moments, the kaleidoscope effect quiets down and the congestion seems more controlled. Each one becomes a swirling visual puzzle to unpack.

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Other images in the exhibit show a mastery of spatial compression, of flattening the objects in the picture plane into abstract compositions of line and form rather than a representation of something in particular. One of my favorite images in the show depicts a gathering of gutter trash, frozen into a dancing mix of forms bound up in a sheet of ice. Boring shots of framed pictures hanging on the wall are suddenly made altogether more puzzling by an open door jutting boldly into the middle of the view. Everyday booth tables at diners and coffee shops are transformed by odd angles and weird shadows. The ultimate New York City cliche, the graffiti covered truck, is flattened out into a chaotic expanse of pattern, intermixed with the lines of ladders and hand carts. And it wouldn't be a Friedlander show without a crazy self-portrait or two; one here captures the artist in a staged window scene with a fur throw, his likeness reflected via a mirror in the display.

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My takeaway from this excellent show is that Friedlander remains at the top of his game, continuing to push the limits of his artistic vision and finding new rules to disregard; the visual chaos here is confidently consistent, the seeming disorder only a thin mask for his mature control of the medium. Wandering around among these images was like being the guy in the chair in front of the huge speaker in that old Maxell cassette tape ad - my hair was literally being blown back by the tremendous force of the output on the walls.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced at $5200 or $7400 based on size. Gallery pricing for Friedlander's new work continues to creep upward, slowly rising over the past several years. A wide variety of his images are routinely available in the secondary markets, ranging from approximately $2000 to as much as $80000 in recent years; at the low end of the price range, one can find later prints, broken up portfolios and lesser known images, and at the high end, vintage prints of his most recognizable images from the 1960s and early 1970s.

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We actually already own three Friedlander images (here, two from Sticks and Stones and one from Stems), and we continue to consider adding others, both old and new, to our collection.

Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)

A few comments about this particular rating: conspiracy theorists out there will likely notice that this review coincides with a banner sponsorship by Janet Borden on the sidebar, and may therefore assume that there is some kind of sinister bias at work in this review. This is not the case. Our reputation for impartiality is worth far more to us than any banner ad, so I can assure you that this show has been rigorously reviewed on its merits alone, without any other external influences, and been found to wholeheartedly deserve three stars.

Transit Hub:

• NY Times reviews: Olmsted parks @Met, 2008 (here), Retrospective @MoMA, 2005 (here)
• Video: Mr. Lee (here)

Lee Friedlander: Still Life

Through December 30th

Janet Borden, Inc.
560 Broadway
New York, NY 10012

Book: Lee Friedlander, Stems

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2003 by Distributed Art Publishers (here). 96 pages with a total of 65 black and white images. Includes a short introductory essay by the artist. (Cover shot at right, via Photo Eye.)

Comments/Context: Over his long career, Lee Friedlander has made many superior photography books, but Stems is my favorite. Taken during the mid 1990s when Friedlander was nursing a pair of bad knees, this series captures still life images of various vases of cut flowers that his wife regularly placed in their home. In the recent history of floral photography, these images are among the very small number of truly innovative pictures of the subject matter made in the past decade.

As the title implies, Friedlander points his camera not at the showy blossoms, but at the clusters of intertwined stems and leaves, jammed into glass vases filled with water. Each flower type on display has its own stem characteristics: thorns for roses, serrated edges for burning bush twigs, smooth elegant tubular forms for tulips and lilies, and bushy leaves for daisies. The stems are then placed in a spectrum of glass containers, from short and round to tall and square, with swirled and shaped vases in between, the combination of glass and water creating a surprising number of visual effects: fogs and bubbles, distortions and exaggerations.

Freidlander's images have always had a signature chaos to them, a claustrophobic clustering of activity, intersecting planes and lines coming together in complex compositions. The stem still lifes are no different: the cut ends of the flowers fight each other for space in the constrained environment, creating thickets and layers of vertical lines, with broad leaves squished against the glass as contrast. Some of the vases are overfilled, choked with stems, while others have only a handful of stems or are even empty. By varying the viewing angle, Friedlander is able to use the reflections and distortions from the glass and water to further complicate the puzzle. In the end, the stems have been transformed from the boring, utilitarian end of the flower into something altogether more exciting: at once lush and luxurious, or harsh and threatening, but altogether original.

Collector’s POV: Lee Friedlander is represented by Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco (here). Very few images from the Stems series have come up for auction, so gallery retail is likely the best option for interested collectors. In our case, given the strength of the work presented here, several years ago, we purchased an image from Stems (here) for the floral genre of our collection. The book itself is a lavish and elegant publication, with beautiful reproductions on tactile paper; it is a master class lesson in book making.

Transit Hub:

• Lee Friedlander: A Ramble in Olmstead Parks, 2008 @Met (here)
• Friedlander, MoMA retrospective, 2005 (here)
• MoMA holdings (here)

Book: Lee Friedlander, New Mexico

JTF (just the facts): Lee Friedlander, New Mexico, 2008, published by Radius Books. 74 pages. Includes 51 black and white images, with a foreword by Andrew Smith and an essay by Emily Ballew Neff. Published in conjunction with an exhibit at the Andrew Smith Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico (site here).

Comments/Context: This exhibition catalogue collects together images that Friedlander took in New Mexico over the past two decades and were shown at the Andrew Smith Gallery this past fall. These images have been drawn from several different projects, and many of the pictures were previously published in Sticks and Stones, The Desert Seen or elsewhere, and as such, this group has a little bit of an "old wine in a new bottle" feel to it.

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Friedlander's recent work, regardless of its particular subject matter (harsh desert scrub brush, fences/yard landscapes, sidewalks/roadways/shadows etc.), has settled into a common framework: square format images, full of high density patterning and visual contrasts. Going back to his earlier work of the 1960s and 1970s, Friedlander has always been interested in how the camera "sees", where the three dimensional world is flattened into a two dimensional plane of line and form. These more current works have taken this concept several evolutionary steps further, as the images get more crowded, brimming with contradictory and chaotic motifs and constructions.

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Friedlander's newest project uses the window (and oftentimes the side mirror) of a non-descript rental car as an additional framing mechanism for his world view. Given the setting of the car, one might think of these pictures as fly-by snapshots, but indeed, they have the same careful composition of all Friedlander's work, and the frames and posts of the car just give him an additional set of dominant lines to unbalance and divide the picture plane.

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An interesting thing to consider is whether the whole construct of this exhibit, namely the New Mexico setting, matters at all. Friedlander's work isn't "about" his environment per se; it's about the compositional shapes and forms that are the outgrowth of the picture making process. So whether the pictures are "of" New Mexico (or any other place for that matter) seems irrelevant. It is his vision of these places that we came to see.

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Collector's POV: Oddly enough, we actually already own an image from this exhibit (here), which came from the Sticks and Stones series, and which we bought from Fraenkel Gallery (site here) a few years ago. Since that time, and likely as a result of the massive Friedlander touring retrospective, retail prices for Friedlander's new work have continued to rise. We don't have a price list from this show, but earlier last year, Friedlander's new work was selling in the $7000 range at retail. One annoying thing about this book is that there is no listing of the images by title, date etc., so there is no way to reference the images, except by their page number. Overall, however, we continue to be amazed by Freidlander's work, and even though this may not be his most ground breaking collection of images, we expect these pictures will likely stand the test of time quite well.