LEE FRIEDLANDER | PHOTOGRAPHER

Lee Friedlander (born July 14, 1934) is an American photographer and artist. In the 1960s and 70s, working primarily with 35mm cameras and black and white film, Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban "social landscape," with many of the photographs including fragments of store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and street-signs.

 Friedlander studied photography at the Art Center College of Design located in Pasadena, California. In 1956, he moved to New York City where he photographed jazz musicians for record covers. His early work was influenced by Eugène Atget, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans. In 1960, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Friedlander a grant to focus on his art and made subsequent grants in 1962 and 1977.

 Some of his most famous photographs appeared in the September 1985 Playboy, black and white nude photographs of Madonna from the late 1970s. A student at the time, he was paid only $25 for her 1979 set, and in 2009, one of the images fetched $37,500 at a Christie's Art House auction.

Working primarily with Leica 35mm cameras and black and white film, Friedlander's style focused on the "social landscape". His art used detached images of urban life, store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, and posters and signs all combining to capture the look of modern life. monovisions

All images © Lee Friedlander

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LEAH GORDON | PHOTOGRAPHER

Leah Gordon is a multi-media artist who curates, collects, writes and directs. She works across a variety of media including photography, film and installations, often including commissioned sculpture and painting. In the 1980's she wrote lyrics, sang and played for the feminist folk punk band, 'The Doonicans'. Leah makes work on Modernism and architecture; the slave trade and industrialisation; and grassroots religious, class and folk histories. Gordon’s film and photographic work has been exhibited internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Dak’art Biennale; the National Portrait Gallery, UK; Parc de la Villette, Paris and NSU Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale. Her photography book 'Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti' was published in June 2010. She is the co-director of the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; was a curator for the Haitian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale; was the co-curator of ‘Kafou: Haiti, History & Art’ at Nottingham Contemporary, UK; on the curatorial team for ‘In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st Century Haitian Art’ at the Fowler Museum, UCLA and was the guest curator for the 2016 NYC Outsider Art Fair. In 2015 Leah Gordon was the recipient of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Travel Award for Central America and the Caribbean. website

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Sixteen year long project of photographs and oral histories documenting Kanaval in Jacmel, Haiti.
Henry Ford once said, "History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition." What we find on the streets of Jacmel at carnival time unravels this statement with acerbity, threat, imagination, grace and a wild surrealism. The whole event is swirling around in a miasma of warped historical retelling. This is the kind of history that would be making Henry Ford's palms a tad sweaty. And so it should. This is people taking history into their own hands and moulding it into whatever they decide. So within this Historical retelling we find mask after mask, but rather than concealing, they are revealing, story after story, through disguise and roadside pantomime. website

All images © Leah Gordon

theguardian

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