Lee Friedlander: Sticks & Stones: Architectural America

First off, you can ignore the 3-star rating here because this is a 5-star book all the way. If you don't know Friedlander, check him out online and become acquainted with his work before deciding to purchase this. Suffice it to say, if you like 'deadpan' work by the likes of Eggleston, Shore, Christenberry, and (Robert) Adams, you're probably a Friedlander fan too but don't know it yet. This book is huge, a little over a foot square, contains a little less than 200 B & W images, almost all in the square format. The printing is excellent with thick, heavy paper and since you always have a big image to look at, your eye will be busy exploring these photographs. I just finished this last night and will be starting over again tonight. Some of the images here are probably going to be in his "America by Car" book just because they are composed that way so maybe you'll see some duplication across these volumes. I don't consider this a book about architecture per-se, to me it's more Friedlander cityscapes and searching for interesting compositional ideas. In any case, the book is a bargain for it's size vs price. Some nice videos of Lee too: [...]

I doubt I'll ever own Lee Friedlander's masterpiece 'The American Monument' (not on retirees budget anyway) but I recently bought Sticks & Stones and I'm content to at least own his second masterpiece. What treat this book is! Here are 196 square format photos of buildings and street scenes that only Friedland could have taken. Turn over the first few pages and you'll immediately be aware of his trademark: utility poles and chain-link fences (though it could also be any kind of street furniture) which form an integral part of the way he sees what is beyond them. By placing these visual elements up-front creates all kinds of wonders when his camera reveals what is in the distance. Throughout the book you'll come across photos that just stop you because they are so overwhelming in detail, foreground vertical and horizontal shapes and shadows merge and frame buildings in the distance which also create other shapes between themselves. So many of these images made me smile inwardly at the way Friedland saturates many photos with irregular shapes and shadows yet what he uses to do this is just the everyday environment. There is a playfulness here that will grab your imagination and nicely you'll discover something fresh each time you open the book. Outstanding photos demand quality printing and the book's production is superb. Printed by Meridian of East Greenwich, Rhode Island, using three hundred screen duotones on a matt semi-coated paper (in an edition of 6,000). Meridian have printed several Friedlander books. Incidentally you can see seventy-one similar photos in the fascinating monograph Friedlander though I have the impression that not all are in Sticks & Stones. The book is a visual celebration by one of America's great photographers. ***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

I was disappointed in the last Friedlander book I bought, The Desert Seen. Luckily, I had a chance to see his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art this summer. Seeing the actual prints made a huge difference and many of the images from the Desert Seen that I didn't "get", I "got" immediately at the MoMA show. I had seen a few stray images from Sticks and Stones in the past but did not realize the towering achievement that this work represented until the show. In my opinion, it is the pinnacle of his work and the aesthetic result of everything that came before. I bought the book the next week. It was beautiful in every way, including concept, execution, printing, binding, cover, and writing. The man is a genius and this book supports that contention. If you like Friedlander, you will love this book.

For years -- probably decades -- I've been hoping to find a collection of Friedlander's great photos of the urban and suburban landscape. I'd buy almost any survey or monograph just to have the two or three examples that might be thrown in among the works of others, or among Friedlander's own wide range of subjects. I'm delighted to say it was worth the wait. Page after beautifully printed page of these compositional masterpieces in large format -- it's almost too good to be true. Like other photographers of "Main Street" or the strip, Friedlander finds beauty in unlikely places. Or maybe it's that he has FUN in unlikely places. His special contribution seems to be in creating a breathtaking (and often comical) tension between polar opposites: order/disorder; flat/deep; simple/complex; central/peripheral; deadpan/melodramatic; earnest/ironic; subtle/obvious; and so on. Friedlander has photographed many great jazz musicians; these photographs suggest that he has been influenced by their music, as he creates great riffs on the raw material he finds in the built environment. Incidentally, I've seen this book in the Architecture section of some bookstores, but don't be fooled -- it is not really about buildings.