@ Lee Friedlander. Nashville, 1963, gelatin silver print. © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York

Written by Max Wiener

Photo Edited by Billy Chen

Copy Edited by Kee’nan Haggen

Joel Coen is a name that immediately brings about a particular creative oeuvre. Along with his brother, Ethan, he created such memorable films as Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and the superbly acclaimed No Country for Old Men, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2007. His body of work has a highly distinguishable energy, much like Lee Friedlander, the inimitable photographer whose decades-long career has placed him in the pantheon of modern artistry. Curating a large body of the photographer’s work, Coen (who worked hand in hand with Friedlander) developed this stunning exhibition titled Lee Friedlander Framed by Joel Coen. The series opened on May 6 at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and has a dual showing at New York’s Luhring Augustine beginning on May 13. Both are set to close on June 24, giving viewers a brief period to fully absorb this stunning breadth of work.

@ Lee Friedlander. New York City, 1969, gelatin silver print. © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York

Friedlander, Coen, and his wife, Frances McDormand, met at the photographer’s home to curate and select images for this collection. The task of summarizing Friedlander’s career in just 65 images is incredibly daunting, and the two artists panned over images for hours before finally choosing the exhibition’s pieces. There had to be something uniquely different with each piece for Coen to choose it, and using his creative lens, he selected images that, on a deeper level, contain some maverick element that makes them stand out from the rest. Coen said that “as a filmmaker, [he] liked the idea of creating a sequence that would highlight [Friedlander’s] unusual approach to framing—his splitting, splintering, repeating, fracturing, and reassembling elements into new and impossible compositions.”

@ Lee Friedlander. Montana, 1977, gelatin silver print. © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York

@ Lee Friedlander. Memphis, 2003, gelatin silver print. © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York

Friedlander’s style is raw, almost as if he wasn’t capturing an image but inviting you into another world. None of the subjects seem to recognize the presence of a camera; this is his specialty. Without a focal point or nature center to each photograph, Friedlander shows us the world as naturally as it can be presented. No glitz, no glamor: just the world through the eyes of the viewer. Staring at the iconic black-and-white stills brings about thoughts of Robert Frank and Fred Herzog, who both showed us their surroundings with a casual and unfiltered eye. There is such an apparent realness to his work that it is remarkably unmistakable and adds a tremendous amount of emotionality to each image. A simple yield sign casting a shadow has a profound effect. It’s a stop-motion capture of the world at a particular time, and by using many of Friedlander’s earlier works, Coen introduces heavy dollops of nostalgia in each piece. It may, from afar, serve as an overarching theme of the overall exhibition, bringing us back to the world that it once was. In the modern age, where everything is so rapidly advancing, perhaps this exhibition will make us appreciate what we have, or even what we once did.