Lee Friedlander - Recent Western Landscape 2008-09 (Hardcover)

Shot in locations such as Glen Canyon, Death Valley and the Mojave Desert, the black-and-white photographs in this handsomely produced volume locate tangles of foreground brush, craggy mountainscape walls and snowy landscapes festooned with leaves. Friedlander's photographs often suit large-format publication, and this 12 x 12.75-inch monograph, with its linen binding and tipped-on cover image, amply houses their magnificent sense of austere scale and intense detail. In his foreword to the volume, Klaus Kertess writes: "The heterogeneous organic mesh so often experienced in the foreground of these landscapes imbue forests and mountains with a kind of intimacy and immediacy ordinarily reserved for those actually trekking through the photographed terrain... The muffled silence of the snowbound landscape, the fragile delicacy of the leaves, and the trees almost dissolving in the misty atmosphere envelop the plane in lyrical reverie seldom equaled in painting or photography."