Lee Friedlander (born 1934) began his career taking portraits of jazz musicians for Atlantic Records in the mid-1950s.
Lee Friedlander (born 1934) began his career taking portraits of jazz musicians for Atlantic Records in the mid-1950s. By the end of the next decade Friedlander's dry, deceptively casual shots of contemporary America—store windows, signs, pedestrians, and self-portraits—had been consecrated as worthy successors in a photographic lineage associated with the work of Robert Frank and Walker Evans. Friedlander has since explored subjects as varied as the California desert, small-town monuments across America, and female nudes, in each case with an apparently slovenly disregard for composition that masks an ascetic rigor.