Lee Friedlander: The Desert Seen
This collection of black-and-white photographs of the Sonoran desert runs counter to the current fashion for coffee-table art photography that emphasizes austere, stylized, isolated figures. Lee Friedlander's images are packed with detail, and the desert of this book is far from empty, but teems with life and visual richness. His landscapes are not sweeping panoramas, instead, they pull in dozens of directions at once. Often there is no apparent center, but many points of interest; branches and thorns of cholla, saguaro, and other cactuses do not so much frame the photos as invade them. In an introductory essay Freidlander aptly compares his work to his other love: jazz.