Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Recent Western Landscape 2008-09.






Recent Western Landscape 2008-09. Photographs by Lee Friedlander. Text by Klaus Kertess. Mary Boone Gallery, 2011. 30 pp., 25 duotone illustrations, 12x12¾".

The book 'Recent Western Landscape 2008-09' was published to accompany the 2010 exhibition of the same name at the Mary Boone Gallery (New York) featuring photographs by the American artist and photographer Lee Friedlander.

I've previously featured books with Lee Friedlander's work here, here and here.


Book description:

"Shot in locations such as Glen Canyon, Death Valley, and the Mojave Desert, in these works Friedlander often focuses on tangles of foreground brush, with occasional glimpses of rocky or snow-covered landscape beyond.

In the catalogue to the exhibition, Klaus Kertess has written:

'The heterogeneous organic mesh so often experienced in the foreground of these landscapes imbue forests and mountains with a kind of intimacy and immediacy ordinarily reserved for those actually trekking through the photographed terrain. The foregrounds do not diminish the power of the hills and mountains but rather draw them into the whole of the rectangular plane, at once veiling and celebrating their volume and shape.

On occasion the reflection of a mountain in a body of water viewed through the interstices of the foregrounded screen draws the mountain into the frontal plane and unfurls a panoply of reflected illusion. When snow is added, the soft light becomes still more diffuse, trees appear as almost immaterial filigrees of shadow, and recalcitrant leaves still clinging to branches enliven the foreground with delicate, chiming repetitions.

The muffled silence of the snowbound landscape, the fragile delicacy of the leaves, and the trees almost dissolving in the misty atmosphere envelop the plane in lyrical reverie seldom equaled inpainting or photography'."

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