(14 de julio de 1934)

Lee Friedlander is an US photographer specialized in “Street Photography” who has become a classic.

He studied photography at the Art Center School between 1953 and 1955, the following year he moved to New York and worked on jazz music album covers. In his first works the influence of Eugéne Atget, Robert Frank and Walker Evans was noticeable.

His first monographic exhibition was held at the George Eastman House in Rochester in 1963 where he was already exploring the urban landscape and giving documentary photography a new meaning. In the exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1967, she stood out alongside Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand as the representative of this new documentary and since then she has taken numerous photographs endowed in many cases with a sense of humor.

Mississippi Fred McDowell 1960

One of his most significant works was the analysis of the chaos in the daily life of the generation of the fifties for which he had a scholarship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1960, 1962 and 1970, the result of this research was the book The American monument and the exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery titled The nation’s capital in photographs. In 1958 he managed to retrieve the negatives of Ernest James Bellocq that contained a series of portraits of prostitutes in New Orleans in the early 20th century, 1 3 in collaboration with Susan Sontag and John Szarkowski, which led to the book entitled Bellocq: photographs from Storyville, the red-light district of New Orleans. Although the nude series he performed on Madonna in 1979 at the beginning of her career, published by Playboy in 1985, are also well known.

Being arthritic, he had to undergo knee surgery and be confined at home, during which time he took a series of photographs that he published in his book Stems (Stems) in 2003. In 2005, the MOMA made a retrospective exhibition of his work, receiving the same year the Hasselblad Foundation international award.