Deborah Bell Photographs is honored to present Lee Friedlander: Christmas, an exhibition of photographs by Lee Friedlander dating from 1958 to 2015, in collaboration with Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York. This exhibition also celebrates the release of Friedlander's most recent book, Lee Friedlander: Christmas, published by the Eakins Press Foundation, New York. Although many of the photographs on view are well known from their inclusion in Friedlander's previous books and numerous exhibition catalogues, and have appeared on the walls of museum and gallery exhibitions internationally, this publication features Friedlander's personal edit of photographs related to the theme of Christmas. As indicated by the Eakins Press Foundation, the book presents 106 beautifully reproduced photographs that span the artist's life, cover most of the United States, and give us a sweeping view of American culture by this renowned photographer of the social landscape. The exhibition will feature some 30 photographs selected from the book.

Peter Kayafas, Director and President of Eakins Press Foundation, writes in the Afterword to the sumptuously illustrated book:

Whether or not you've celebrated Christmas at any point over the past seventy years--roughly the period covered by these photographs--you have no doubt encountered some of the things Friedlander shows us here....Is Christmas in America a religious holiday? A commercial precept? An ironic commentary? A misunderstanding? An indulgent blasphemy? All or none of the above? In these pictures, the only thing certain is that Christmas has provided an opportunity for the people's photographer to hold up a mirror--and make no mistake, it is Friedlander's mirror--to a diverse, flawed, inventive, preoccupied, and spectacular society.

Lee Friedlander, born in 1934 in Aberdeen, Washington, began photographing the American landscape in 1948. With an ability to organize a vast amount of visual information in dynamic compositions, Friedlander has made humorous and poignant images among the chaos of city life, dense natural landscape, fellow artists, friends and family, and countless other subjects. Friedlander is also recognized for a group of self-portraits he began in the 1960s, reproduced in Self-Portrait, an exploration that he turned to again in the 1990s.

Friedlander's work was included in the highly influential 1967 New documents exhibition, organized by John Szarkowski at The Museum of Modern Art. He was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1960, 1962, and 1977, and received the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1972, 1977, 1978, 1979, and 1980. In 1990 Friedlander received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. In 2005, he was the subject of a major traveling retrospective and catalogue organized by Peter Galassi at The Museum of Modern Art, and was the recipient of the prestigious Hasselblad Award.

Friedlander received the International Center of Photography's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. In 2010, the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited the entirety of his body of work, America by car. In 2015, Eakins Press published Friedlander's earliest pictures of participants in the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in Washington, DC, and the Yale University Art Gallery exhibited a selection of these photographs in 2017, the same year that he received the Lucie Lifetime Achievement Award. A six-volume suite of portraits by Friedlander of his fellow photographers Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand, William Christenberry, William Eggleston, John Szarkowski, and Richard Benson, titled Lee Friedlander: The mind and the hand, was published by Eakins Press in the spring of 2019. The celebrated publication Lee Friedlander: Framed, with images selected by Joel Coen and Afterword by Frances McDormand, was published by Fraenkel in 2023.

Friedlander's prints are held in the collections of major institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago; George Eastman Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art; National Gallery of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, and countless others worldwide.