Lee Friedlander: Maria

A loving portrait of the artist's wife and muse--and a chronicle of his own photographic language--over seven decades of marriage

Known for his complex photographs of the American social landscape, Lee Friedlander has also photographed his wife, Maria, for many years, directing his relentlessly curious eye to a subject he approaches with tenderness, awe and amusement. Maria presents a seven-decade extended portrait of the artist's wife, bringing together more than 70 images tracing the arc of their relationship, through marriage, parenthood, grandparenthood and beyond. On the surface, the pictures catalog the stuff of everyday life: Maria reading, driving, talking on the phone, lying in the sun, reading another book. Sometimes Maria serves as a muse in the traditional sense, with a composition that is nothing more than a man marveling at his wife. Many images reflect Friedlander's sustained appreciation for his wife's self-possessed style. But eventually, the portraits begin to take on the attributes of Friedlander's idiosyncratic approach to image-making--shadows, objects and reflections intrude, and certain images appear as fractured as cracked plates. Collecting photographs made over the course of a rich and complicated partnership, the book reflects the particular triumphs and mysteries of life with an artist.
Lee Friedlander (born 1934) has published more than 60 monographs since 1969. He was represented alongside Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand in the 1967 New Documents exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, now understood as a landmark event in American documentary photography, and received his own retrospective at the same museum in 2005. He has lived and worked in New York since 1956.