Walter Hopps. - Review - book review

In the '90S, photographer Lee Friedlander embarked on a remarkable series of self-portraits taken around the United States and abroad. Seventy-seven of them are reproduced in Lee Friedlander (Fraenkel Gallery). One of our great photographers, Friedlander has created a dialogue between his own image and a wonderful array of his other subjects. Take him out of some of these portraits--like the one of him leaning his head against a nasty outdoor metal post bristling with bent wires and bolts--and you've got a classic early Friedlander. The photos are unflinchingly honest: The artist looks lumpy and a little out of it. He doesn't disguise--perhaps he even exaggerates--the failure, not of spirit, but of flesh. It's the work of an older man taking a clear look at what he's made and what he's become.

Walter Hopps is founding director of Houston's Menil collection, where he is at present a consulting curator, and art editor of Grand Street magazine.

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