Photo Edition: Lee Friedlander

"Dog's Best Friend"

Art Dogs is a weekly dispatch introducing the pets—dogs, yes!, but also cats, lizards, marmosets, and more—that were kept by our favorite artists. Subscribe to receive these weekly posts to your email inbox.

Self-portrait. "New City, New York, 1996"

Lee Friedlander was born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1934. He’s been earning pocket money as a photographer since he was 14 years old. At 26, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and started showing photographs at the MoMA in his early thirties. In 1990, he was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant.”

A photography curator at The Met described Lee Friedlander’s photographs as “a sight for sore eyes, for eyes inured to advertising and all the other images that inundate us.” He’s regularly among the names mentioned when discussing the most important living American photographer.

Washington, D.C., May 17, 1957. Lee Friedlander/Eakins Press Foundation

In Lee Friedlander’s early work, he used hand-held Leica 35 mm cameras and black-and-white film. He’s still working today at the age of 88, shooting six days a week and printing his old negatives in a darkroom in the basement of his house, but now Lee primarily uses medium format cameras.

Though his tools and film choices have been quite consistent, the breadth of his portfolio is hard to convey in simple terms. He’s shot series of everything from public monuments, motel rooms and party scenes to portraits, self-portraits, nudes and landscapes. And—you guessed it—dogs.

Lee Friedlander is notoriously media shy, but he is on the record saying that his photographs “are a hint, just a blink at a piece of the real world. At most, an aphrodisiac.” Those words seem like accurate ones to describe his photographs of dogs, which I collected a number of for today’s photo edition of Art Dogs. If you love these photos as much as I do, you can take many of them home in one of Lee Friedlander’s books titled Dog’s Best Friend.

Until next time,

Bailey

Mississippi, 1971

Los Angeles, California, 1970

Superstition Mountains, Arizona, 1989

New York City, 1960

Kentucky, 1965

Maria Morris, Bailey Island, Maine, 1976

New York City, 1960

Alaska, 1988

Bettina Katz, Cleveland, Ohio, 2009. From the series America by Car, 1995-2009

“I always wanted to be a photographer. I was fascinated with the materials. But I never dreamed I would be having this much fun.” — Lee Friedlander

In addition to Lee Friedlander’s wonderful dog photographs, I feel compelled to share some of his self-portraits. They are some of the best I’ve ever seen—and lord have a I seen a lot.

Grand Canyon, 1997

A self-portrait by Lee Friedlander. "Graves Island, Nova Scotia, 2020" – © Avard Woolaver

Tucson, 1997

Montana, 1977

Tokyo, 1994

Oregon, 1997

New York City, 1966

Canyon de Chelly, 1983

“Cannon Beach, Oregon,” 1997 (with his wife of sixty years, Maria)