SELF-PORTRAIT: PHOTOGRAPHS BY LEE FRIEDLANDER
Three Volume Set
Lee Friedlander
Lee Friedlander: SELF-PORTRAIT: PHOTOGRAPHS BY LEE FRIEDLANDER. New York: Haywire Press, 1970. First edition. Oblong small quarto. np [88 pp]. Stiff photographically printed wrappers. Black-and-white reproductions printed by Meriden Gravure. A very good or better copy with light wear to wrappers and spine edges. Friedlander's first monograph.
8.5 x 9 softcover book where Friedlander writes in the introduction, "I might call myself an intruder." Interestingly, this idea is carried forth in Roth's "Book of 101 Books" where Vince Aletti states, "Friedlander does seem to be lurking or barging into his own pictures -- a hovering, disembodied Everyman, at once here and gone. Like the ephemeral figures in nineteenth-century spirit photos, he appears as a shadow, a reflection, a pair of shoes, a barely discernible shape.
"Memory, transience, identity, and the impossibility of capturing anything more than a fiction or a mask in photographic portraiture -- Friedlander put all these issues slyly into play with Self-Portrait," writes Vince Aletti in The Book of 101 Books, "along with a snapshot-style looseness and idiosyncrasy that sit well in this simple, straightforward design." [Roth, p. 198]
Lee Friedlander: SELF PORTRAIT. San Francisco and New York: Fraenkel Gallery and D.A.P., 1998. Second edition (first edition published by Friedlander's own Haywire Press in 1970). Oblong quarto. Thick photo-illustrated wrappers. 96 pp. 49 duotone plates. A fine copy.
With its understated, ironic wit Lee Friedlander's classic, Self-Portrait was one of the most influential monographs of its time (and one of the most sought-after as well). As Martin Parr and Gerry Badger write of the first edition in The Photobook: A History, Vol. I, Friedlander "critiques the act of photographing, laying bare the process, and emphasizing that it is about personal point of view. Self Portrait is a complex, subtle work that functions as an oblique document of contemporary experience." This is a beautifully produced, faithful, and worthy edition, adding a few well-known images not originally included and John Szarkowski's essay.
Lee Friedlander: SELF PORTRAIT. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005. Third edition [retains the new material of the second edition (D.A.P., New York City in association with the Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, 1998) except in its design, which returns to that of the original book (Haywire Press, New York City, 1970)]. Oblong quarto. Black cloth stamped in white. Photo-illustrated dust jacket. 104 pp. 46 duotone plates. A near fine copy in a near fine dust jacket.
10.25 x 9.5 hard cover book with 104 pages and 46 duotones. Includes an afterword by John Szarkowski. Original design by Lee Friedlander and Marvin Israel, adapted for this edition by Amanda Washburn.
Lee Friedlander's surreal sensibility is on full display in this set of photographs, where he focuses on the role of his own physical presence in his images. He writes: 'At first, my presence in my photos was fascinating and disturbing. But as time passed and I was more a part of other ideas in my photos, I was able to add a giggle to those feelings.' Here readers can witness this progression as Friedlander appears in the form of his shadow, or reflected in windows and mirrors, and only occasionally fully visible through his own camera. In some photos he visibly struggles with the notion of self-portraiture, desultorily shooting himself in household mirrors and other reflective surfaces. Soon, though, he begins to toy with the pictures, almost teasingly inserting his shadow into them to amusing and provocative effect-elongated and trailing a group of women seen only from the knees down; cast and bent over a chair as if seated in it; mirroring the silhouette of someone walking down the street ahead of him; or falling on the desert ground, a large bush standing in for hair. These uncanny self-portraits evoke a surprisingly full landscape of the artist's life and mind.