{"id":7450,"date":"2017-07-11T10:21:41","date_gmt":"2017-07-11T10:21:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=7450"},"modified":"2017-07-11T10:21:41","modified_gmt":"2017-07-11T10:21:41","slug":"haywire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=7450","title":{"rendered":"Haywire"},"content":{"rendered":"

Long ago, while still a fairly young and impressionable photographer back in the 1970s, I first came across the work of Lee Friedlander<\/em> in the pages of Creative Camera<\/a> and was immediately a fan (though I’d probably seen some of his work without knowing who it was by in jazz magazines and on record sleeves earlier.)<\/p>\n

So a few years later when the same magazine announced a book of his photographs, self-published by the Haywire Press, I immediately ordered it by post from them. Lee Friedlander: Photographs<\/em> was published in 1978, but it took a very long time to arrive, as I think neither Haywire <\/em>– Friedlander’s own publishing business or Creative Camera were the most reliable of companies, but eventually it came and I spent a great deal of time studying it’s pages. I’ve got several more Friedlander books since, but it probably remains my favourite, and is still available at a fairly reasonable price secondhand – probably less, allowing for inflation than I paid in 1978.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t Friedlander and Haywire Press’s first book, they began with Self Portrait <\/em>in 1970, and I remember looking through it a year or two later, perhaps at the Photographers Gallery. I didn’t buy it, partly because I thought I’d already seen the best of the work in magazines, but largely because I simply couldn’t afford it. I did buy the second edition around 1998.<\/p>\n

The year before Self Portrait, Friedlander’s photographs had been published in a book paired with etchings by Jim Dine, Work From the Same House<\/a><\/em>, a slim volume with 33 black and white plates. An image shows the two artists, lying on a bed looking towards the camera but dominated by the sole of a shoe in the foreground. And it states:<\/p>\n

Biographical details of Lee Friedlander are almost non-existent. Aside from being one of America’s leading photographers, recently exhibiting work at the Museum of Modern Art, he was born in 1934 in Aberdeen, Washington and lives in New City [sic] New York with his wife and two children. He is said to be right handed.<\/p>\n

There is now rather more information on line, but I still learnt quite a few things from the video of the NYPL talk.\u00a0 Work From the Same House was published by Trigram Press on the Kings Road in London and printed in Chatham, Kent. I think I once had a copy (it sold for 21s – \u00a31.05 – when published), but being so slim it’s hard to find!<\/p>\n

Thanks to a report of the first interview given by Friedlander in 30 years reported in PDNPulse, How Lee Friedlander Edits His Photo Books<\/a>, I now know why he called his self-publishing company Haywire Press. You can see and hear the whole event at the New York Public Library web site, though at around an hour and a half long I’ve not yet found time to sit an watch all the way through. Friedlander, sitting with a camera around his neck, is interviewed by his grandson, Giancarlo T. Roma, and there are certainly some interesting moments, though as he was born on 14th July 1934, there are a few minor lapses of memory, but he seems in great shape for someone coming up to 83.<\/p>\n

Of course Friedlander has taken many pictures since that 1978 book, and I’ve bought a few more of his books (and got others as review copies), including Like a One-Eyed Cat<\/em> and Letters from the People<\/em>, though there have been some areas of his work that have left me cold. But he has given us so much, and I’ll certainly be wishing him a happy birthday on Friday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Long ago, while still a fairly young and impressionable photographer back in the 1970s, I first came across the work of Lee Friedlander in the pages of Creative Camera and was immediately a fan (though I’d probably seen some of his work without knowing who it was by in jazz magazines and on record sleeves … Continue reading Haywire<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-own-work"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7450"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7452,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7450\/revisions\/7452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}