The actor Frances McDormand, who was present when her husband, the film-maker Joel Coen, first met the photographer Lee Friedlander, was struck by their immediate rapport. It was rooted, she writes in her afterword to a new book, Lee Friedlander Framed by Joel Coen, in “a familiarity that comes from their lifetimes of singular and eccentric visions”.
At 88, Friedlander is 20 years older than Coen, and has been looking at the world in his off-kilter way since he first picked up a camera, aged 14. His subject matter is extravagantly wide-ranging, from busy streets and deserted parking lots to the gloomy interiors of motel rooms and shadowy self-portraits, but his style is unmistakeable. “I’m still shooting the same subjects when I go out west,” he said recently. “The more jumble, the better I like them – if they work.”
