Friedlander’s social landscape is a who’s who of postwar American photography

In the 1960s and ‘70s, Lee Friedlander (born 1934) developed his signature approach to documenting the American social landscape deadpan, structurally complex black-and-white photographs of seemingly anything, anybody or anyplace that passed in front of his lens. But as he was making his name as a documentary photographer capturing the look and feel of modern American life, he was also photographing his closest friends, a practice he has continued throughout his long career.

A slipcased set of six paperback books, The Mind and the Hand presents the photographer’s intimate portraits of six of his best friends taken over the past five decades. The subjects, each presented in their own separate volume, comprise a veritable who’s who of one of America’s most fertile periods in photography: Richard Benson, William Christenberry, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, John Szarkowski and Garry Winogrand. Each volume begins with a relevant quote from its subject.