Arts & Culture

What I love best about the Toronto Reference Library is its collection of magnificent art books.

Lately, I've been looking at the work of American master photographer Lee Friedlander.

Friedlander is the size of a coffee table book but it is a scholarly superbly edited overview of 45 years of his work.

But the library also has magnificent little books by Lee Friedlander.

Let me show you some of my favourites:

Self Portrait put Friedlander on the map when it was published in 1970. His idea of possible self portraits includes dim reflections in busy shop windows, and the outline of his shadow.

These pictures work very well as a group. The more of them you see, the better and funnier, they get.

Lee Friedlander: stems is typical of his approach to photography. He looked at a vase of flowers and took pictures of the stems.

The pictures in Lee Friedlander: the desert seen defy decades of agreement about what makes a "good" photographic print — i.e. detail in the highlights and detail in the shadows.

Check out Friedlander's bleached-out highlights for yourself. He rewrote the rules.

I have room for one last book: Lee Friedlander Photographs, Fredrerick Law Olmstead Landscapes.You'll know Olmstead as the designer of New York's Central Park.

Describing his work on the book Friedlander inadvertantly summed up his ongoing artistic career: 

"I needed to use all that I had learned, every trick, my best gear, whatever wit I was capable of, and I had to be as sharp and aware and immediate as a spark."