Signs

Le livre

Traffic signs, sandwich boards and posters: Friedlanders portrait of words in the worldFor more than five decades, Lee Friedlander has repeatedly been drawn to the signs that inscribe the American landscape, from hand-lettered ads to storefront windows to massive billboards. Incorporating these markings with precision and sly humor, Friedlanders photographs record a kind of found poetry of desire and commerce.Focusing on one of the artists key motifs,Lee Friedlander: Signspresents a cacophony of wheat-paste posters, Coca-Cola ads, prices for milk, road signs, stop signs, neon lights, movie marquees and graffiti. The book collects 144 photographs made in New York and other places across the US, and features self-portraits, street photographs and work from series includingThe American MonumentandAmerica by Car, among others. Illegible or plainspoken, crude or whimsical, Friedlanders signs are an unselfconscious portrait of modern life.Lee Friedlander(born 1934) began photographing in 1948. Among his many monographs areSticks and Stones,Self-Portrait,Letters from the People,Cherry Blossom Time in JapanandAt Work, among others. His work was included in the influential 1967 exhibitionNew Documentsat the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski. Among the most important living photographers, Friedlander is in the collections of museums around the world.