"I always wanted to be a photographer. I was fascinated with the materials. But I never dreamed I would be having this much fun. I imagined something much less elusive, much more mundane." The work of this photographer proves that if you know what you're doing, then you can make a long- or short-term project out of just about anything. In fact, he's created so many of these projects during his career that there's a photobook dedicated specifically to providing an introduction to each of his first fifty projects.

Lee Friedlander began his journey as a photographer in the late 1940s. During his early career he helped to redefine what street photography could be and what it could look like. Recognition for his work began to take shape in the mid 1960s through an exhibition that was extremely profound in shaping not only Friedlander's career but street photography as a whole, called New Documents, because it also included the work of Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus.

It was put together by legendary MOMA curator John Szarkowski as a way to define a new generation of photographers. He believes they did this through photographs that "emphasized the pathos and conflict of modern life presented without editorializing or sentimentalizing, but with a critical, observant eye." That observant nature continued through the countless projects that Friedlander would go on to create as he captured different subjects in a serialized fashion that is truly unique to him.

The Little Screens was one of Friedlander's first projects to get published. Legendary street photographer Walker Evans described these images that first appeared in Harper's Bazaar as "deft, witty, spanking little poems of hate" as each of the black and white photos created by Friedlander in the early 1960s is a commentary on the distinct difference between the lived experiences of Americans and the ones they watched play out on TV.

This project provides two major insights for anyone looking to grow in the world of photography and make something that stands the test of time. One is that it is a great example of the importance of documenting every day life. We could easily take this in context with our own time and document how social media has become ingrained into all of our lives. Is the attempt to avoid including smartphones in photos or any modern device that appears ugly and modern really necessary, or should we look to include them as much as possible? Seeing how they will clearly mark this period of human history and will be things we look back on with fondness or disdain in the future.

The other main takeaway is that Friedlander created this work when he was pretty young and although it's not necessarily extremely profound; it is witty and it couldn't have been extremely difficult to capture from a technical standpoint, which speaks to the potential for anyone with a bit of personality to create on a similar level regardless of age,technical skill, or time spent with a given artistic medium. Even though it seems like everything has been done there are still endless paths that haven't been explored and simply attempting to dive into any multitude of subjects can change your perspective on the world you experience every day.

"Well, what happens is, you do two, and you think maybe there's three, and then three became one hundred and fifty, or whatever." Of his many infactuations, Lee Friedlander has also always been compelled to create photos that showcase many aspects of America. The American Monument is a book of over 200 images of well-known and completely obscure monuments that show different levels of reverence citizens have for historic events that took place in their communities large or small.

These monuments are scattered across the United States and the images celebrate photographic history in a somewhat similar way as they are influenced by photographers who came before Friedlander like Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Eugene Atget. Evans and Frank who traversed and documented America in similar ways to some extent and Atget who went to great lengths to document all aspects of the urban landscape of Paris.

His love for capturing images all over the U.S. is also shown in his project America by Car. Dashboards, rearview mirrors, and the drivers of these vehicles take up a large part of these frames, but in doing so we see a vision of the American landscape that is familiar to anyone who has traversed it in any kind of extensive way that draws our attention similar to how it would on a roadtrip towards any of the unique details that stand out on the often endlessly mundane plains of middle America, perpetual placement of homes in suburbs, or domino like standing of skyscrapers in America's biggest cities.

An example of one of his many projects that draws on similar themes, but with completely different subject matter is called Signs. For more than fifty years Friedlander took photos of signs that range from small hand-lettered advertisements housed by local businesses to the other extreme in scale in the form of a variety of billboards. Signs were also photographed at parking lots, coffee shops, gas stations, strip clubs, and in the form of every day street signs. These photos were taken all over America with a substantial amount made in New York and San Francisco.

This barely scratches the surface of everything that Friedlander created, but it would take countless pages to cover them all. So, I want to touch on a few more that stood out to me in a condensed fashion, namely Mannequin which features over 100 images of mannequins as subjects often seen through reflections of store front windows, Cherry Blossom which was captured on his trips to Japan during the cherry blossom season in 1977, 79, 81, and 84, Dog's Best Friend is a project that centers around displaying the human obsession with dogs sincethe mentality is so often reversed that they are obsessed with us, and Chain Link which draws the viewers attention to the obstructions in our lives, especially one that we see so often and are regularly missing from photographs since fences are typically seen to ruin the frame even though they are oddly a big part of our lives since we encounter them so often.

At the time of completing this essay there is currently a listing at $24,000 to purchase 1st editions of all 87 of the books that he released from 1963 to 2023 showing both how prolific he's been and how much reverence there continues to be for this work.