Lee Friedlander

This exhibition of photographs by American photographer Lee Friedlander was brought to Melbourne with the help of the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). It featured fifty photographs taken by Friedlander from 1962 to 1973 and originally took place at MoMA from 6 December 1974 to 17 February 1975.

John Szarkowski, then Director of the Department of Photography at MoMA, wrote in an introduction to the exhibition:

‘Seeing a decade of Friedlander’s work in retrospect, one recognises with some surprise what doubtless should have been obvious all along: Friedlander makes only photographs that give him pleasure. He is not concerned with the current market value of his material in social or political terms. This friendly, low-keyed hedonism is more surprising because his pictures often feed on the same subject matter that has nourished that more familiar style of contemporary expression identified by the spirit of desperate angst.’