Lee Friedlander's decisive framing

It is not usual for the reception in a photography exhibition to be listening to Miles Davis or Ray Charles, but it is that the beginning of Lee Friedlander's career (Aberdeen, Washington, 86 years old) were his images for vinyl covers, about 300 , like John Coltrane in

, and portraits of jazz figures, thanks to commissions for the newly created Atlantic Records.

They are the only color photos of the 350 in the retrospective that the Mapfre Foundation dedicates to one of the great photographers of the second half of the 20th century.

An author who over six decades has not ceased to subvert the established order, to move away from the canons, in each of the genres he has approached, thanks to an eye for the always surprising framing, which fills with questions to those who watch every one of his takes, and a considerable dose of irony.

PHOTO GALLERY: Lee Friedlander Exhibition at the Mapfre Foundation, Madrid

If jazz is one of Friedlander's passions ("I was stunned," he said the first time he heard Charlie Parker), the other is his 35-millimeter Leica, so it is no accident that the freedom and improvisation that govern this musical genre, he has transferred it to photographic paper.

His first personal work was

, published in

in 1963. In it, he took as the protagonist an object turned into another inhabitant of American houses, television, and photographed it, for example, while the nude of a woman, with the apparatus in a room in which a mirror reflects an unmade bed.

In other cases, the faces in the foreground on televisions “seem to be in the room;

they are very contrasted images, still lifes in which there is a mixture of melancholy and humor ”, says Carlos Gollonet, curator of the exhibition, which opens from October 1 to January 10, 2021. Games by an author who discovered photography as a thing "Of witchcraft", he declared, since when he was five years old he was ecstatic in a dark room in which he saw how a portrait of his father emulsified on the paper.

• The MOMA dedicates a retrospective to the heterogeneous gaze of Lee Friedlander

• Life in mirrors

There are more grays in his following works, in which the streets of New York or Baltimore, with their shop windows and citizens, focus his objective.

Like the child who looks from inside a store between signs for "Pepsi" and "Sandwiches."

Images in which "you have to stop, because of the many elements that are discovered between shadows and reflections", adds Gollonet, who highlights that the exhibition, integrated in PHotoESPAÑA, is a work of almost four years, with pieces donated by Friedlander, his gallery and the Mapfre collection.

A novelty of this exhibition are the snapshots that Friedlander took in Spain in 1964, shown for the first time, says the curator, and which were in a box with the label “Spain”.

Among them, a pair with the Osborne bull.

A member of the new documentary filmmakers in the United States, along with Bruce Davidson, Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, interested in the social landscape of their country, Friedlander again surprised with funny self-portraits, which he conceived as if he were part of what was shown.

It was his second book, in which he is seen reflected in shop windows, mirrors, or the well-known self-portrait with his shadow on the rough stone in Canyon de Chelly, in Arizona, in 1983. The exhibition continues with the portraits he made of characters acquaintances or anonymous people, "with unusual perspectives and illuminations," says Gollonet.

The monuments of America

In showcases there are many of the fifty books that Friedlander has published, for whom the best way to see photography is in that format.

One of them is

(1976), a 10-year project with 200 photos to commemorate the tricentennial of the United States, a fundamental book in the history of photography, in which monuments are almost the least important, but rather the surrounding people, trees, or road signs.

A joy of volumes and grays, with that way of composing that leaves the viewer dislocated.

It is what Gollonet defines as “the precise framing”, in contrast to the classic photography of the “precise moment”, which Cartier-Bresson defined.

Friedlander also took care to portray the intimacy of his family, but without irony or idealization.

His wife, his children and grandchildren… the portrait of Maria, his wife, almost naked, leaning against a wall, and with his shadow on her body is overwhelming.

Quite a declaration of love.

The nudes have been part of his work;

nothing conventional, with games of lights and unexpected postures.

Among them, the explicit one of a very young Madonna, when she was still a dancer with few dollars in her pocket, in which she is seen in a pose reminiscent

of Courbet's

.

The tour shows that Friedlander's amusing view of reality has not left him over the years, as can be seen in his series of close-ups of telemarketers at work, in which, once again, he makes the everyday something extraordinary. Your ability to reinvent yourself is overwhelming. In the 1990s he switched to a Hasselblad camera to capture all the arid beauty of the Sonoran desert, and in 2010 he published

, in which he returns to the American urban landscape, but with images taken from the car's dashboard, and of the which are part of the mirrors and windshields. Friedlander continues taking photos, preparing books… nothing defines his dedication to photography better than the self-portrait that he took in a clinic after an operation. The first thing he asked for was his camera.