Lee Friedlander

2018 Honoree / Lifetime Achievement Award

Lee Friedlander, born in 1934, began photographing the American social landscape in 1948. With an ability to organize a vast amount of visual information in dynamic compositions, Friedlander has made humorous and poignant images among the chaos of city life, dense landscape and countless other subjects.  Friedlander is also recognized for a group of self-portraits he began in the 1960s, reproduced in Lee Friedlander: Self Portrait, an exploration that he turned to again in the late 1990s, and published in a monograph by Fraenkel Gallery in 2000.  Friedlander’s work was included in the highly influential 1967 New Documents exhibition, curated by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art.  Included among the many monographs designed and published by Friedlander himself are, Sticks and Stones, Lee Friedlander Photographs, Letters From the People, Apples and Olives, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan, Family, and At Work.  Lee Friedlander was the subject of a major traveling retrospective and catalog organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 2005. In 2010, the Yale University Art Gallery and Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired Lee Friedlander’s archive. That same year, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, exhibited Friedlander’s complete series of 192 photographs America by Car. In 2011 Yale University Press published a highly praised catalog of Friedlander’s self-portraits spanning his entire career, entitled In the Picture: Self-Portraits 1958-2011. In 2013, along with the publication of Friedlander’s catalogs JFK: A Photographic Memoir and The Nudes: A Second Look, the complete set of America by Car photographs traveled to the FOAM Museum in Amsterdam and was exhibited alongside Friedlander’s earlier series The New Cars 1964.