The photographer Lee Friedlander likes to work alone. Since the age of 14, when he picked up a camera and began capturing images almost every single day, Friedlander has printed all of his photographs himself. Instead of an assistant, his signature 35-mm. Leica is his companion of choice.
Born in 1934 in Aberdeen, Washington, Friedlander studied photography from 1953 to 1955 at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, then switched coasts to New York soon after. There, he met fellow photographers Richard Avedon and Walker Evans, and launched his career taking portraits of jazz artists such as Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. In the same decade, Friedlander roamed the country’s various landscapes as a visual flâneur, led by a simple philosophy to capture anything and everything. “I am not a premeditative photographer,” he once said. “I see a picture and I make it.”
