Pioneering photographer Lee Friedlander has been making images of what he calls “the American social landscape” for more than 50 years. His influence reaches across several generations— through pivotal exhibitions such as The Museum of Modern Art’s 2005 retrospective, and through his own specific feel for the book format, evident from the first monograph of 1970, Self-Portrait, to recent volumes such as Apples & Olives, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan and Frederick Law Olmstead Landscapes.

Friedlander has been visiting Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and northern New Mexico since the late 60s. This new volume of work presents a sequence of images made during his travels in these regions between 1995 and the present. Armed with his signature Hasselblad camera and wandering the back roads in an assortment of rental cars, Friedlander has journeyed from the Plaza of Santa Fe to adobe strewn neighborhood barrios and into the gorgeous, high-altitude desert. In Lee Friedlander: New Mexico, we see the same attentive curiosity that we’ve come to expect. He is a master of creating unity out of diverse shapes and complex tones in the two dimensional picture plane.

About the Photographer

Lee Friedlander, born in 1934, began photographing the American social landscape in 1948 including portraits of jazz musicians and street photography. With an ability to organize a vast amount of visual information, Friedlander has made humorous and poignant images among the chaos of city life, dense landscape and countless other subjects. Friedlander’s work was included in the highly influential 1967 “New Documents” exhibition, curated by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art. Among the many additional monographs on Friedlander’s work are Sticks and Stones, Self-Portraits, Letters From the People, Apples and Olives, Family, and People at Work. Friedlander was the subject of a major traveling retrospective and catalog organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 2005.

About the Author

Emily Ballew Neff is curator of American painting and sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and curator of “The Modern West” exhibition, 2006.