Self-portraiture is a challenging and complicated subject for any artist. Many fascinating and daunting questions emerge: if an artist is also the subject of the work, is there a conflict of interest? Or does self-portraiture afford an artist the opportunity to explore more freely the significance and meaning of his own presence within the world? And, what do these works actually tell us about an artist? Throughout his career, the preeminent photographer Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) has taken on the challenge of self-portraiture. In this extraordinary book, we experience the full range of Friedlander's photography, from his early works to recent photographs taken of the artist with his family.

Photographer Friedlander offers his view of America as seen through its architecture. Shot during the course of countless trips to urban and rural areas across the country, many of them made by car, these pictures capture an America as unblemished by romanticized notions of human nature as it is full of quirky human touches. 192 duotones.

In 1964, two young art directors at Harper's Bazaar named Ruth Ansel and Bea Feitler hired the then up-and-coming photographer Lee Friedlander to photograph the much-anticipated new car models of that year. Friedlander's jazz album covers had proven he knew how to work on assignment, and Ansel and Feitler realized that if Bazaar was to obtain the photographer's best work he should be let alone to make it. It's difficult now to comprehend how anticipated next year's cars were to Americans of the 1960s, but if Friedlander was aware of this, the photographs he delivered (on time) don't betray it. Rather than depicting the cars in seductive locales, he had them delivered to parking lots near burger joints, cheap furniture stores, downscale beauty parlors and — most ignominiously of all — a used-car lot. As Friedlander says, I just put the cars out in the world, instead of on a pedestal. The magazine's editor-in-chief was unamused, fearing that the photographs would deter car manufacturers from advertising in Harper's, so Friedlander was paid for his work and the photographs were soon forgotten — until he stumbled across them in 2010. Even a cursory study of this project reveals a compendium of strategies that would soon bring Friedlander acclaim and wreak havoc with widely accepted notions of what constituted a good photograph. Now, the Continentals, Eldorados and Mercury Meteors of 1964 have their day in this beautifully produced volume.

Lee Friedlander is one of the few artists in any medium to have sustained a body of influential work over five decades. To make the photographs in Mannequin, he returned to the hand-held, 35-mm camera that he used in the earliest decades of his career. Over the past three years, Friedlander has roamed the sidewalks of New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco, focusing on storefront windows and reflections that conjure marketplace notions of sex, fashion and consumerism, while recalling Atget's surreal photographs of Parisian windows made 100 years earlier. Thoroughly straightforward, their unsettling and radical new compositions suggest photographs that have been torn up and pasted back together again in near-random ways. Lee Friedlander (born 1934) first came to public attention in the landmark exhibition New Documents, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1967. The range of his work since then-including portraits, nudes, still lifes and studies of people at work-is anchored in a uniquely vivid and far-reaching vision of the american scene. More than 40 books about his work have been published since the early 1970s, including Self-Portrait, Sticks and Stones, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan, Family, America by Car, People at Work and The New Cars 1964. His career was the focus of a major traveling retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art in 2005. His work can be found in depth in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art, among many others.

Landscape photography may soothe or disturb; beckon one to forbidden corners of the world or remind us of those spaces only memory recalls. Award-winning photographer Lee Friedlander knows how to evoke such complex responses even when, as in The Desert Seen, the landscape is as strange and impenetrable as that of the Sonora Desert. Here cacti as expansive and preposterous as oceanic fauna are photographed with the reverence befitting nature's craftsmanship. Accompanied by a gentle but probing essay written by Friedlander especially for this book, the 94 magnificent tritone reproductions are an event for desert enthusiasts and photography connoisseurs alike.

In 1994, suffering from aching knees and painfully concerned about it, Lee Friedlander decided to prepare himself for a sedentary life. He began to pursue the still life as a possibility and maybe a way of photographic life a dramatic shift for a man who has spent his life photographing on the street, in the woods, on the road, at parties, anywhere but sitting down. He tried a variety of subjects with a few good results, but nothing stood out until he began to look at the fresh flowers that his wife Maria placed around their home in cut-glass vases. But never mind the flowers. True to Friedlander's style, he very quickly found himself most interested in the stems. During the months of February, May, June and December of 1994, he focused his lens on wild arrays of stems and the optical splendor produced by light refracting through the glass vases that contained them. In 1998, Friedlander had both of his knees surgically replaced. Three months of recovery time passed during which he took no pictures, the only gap in almost 50 years of working. The next year, successfully rehabilitated and walking without pain, Friedlander decided to re-apply himself to the stems and finish them off as a subject. Published in a lush, oversize volume, printed with a special drytrap process, Stems is the result of this unusual saga in the photographer's career. Lee Friedlander and his camera have now returned to the street.

In the Industrial North at the end of the 1970s, people were at work using hands and machinery to make things we all use. In the mid 80s, in Wisconsin, they built supercomputers; at the same time, near Boston, they typed on desktop computers. In New York City, in the early 90s, people stood on stock floors, trading. In 1995, in Omaha, they sat at computers, cold calling as telemarketers; and in Cleveland, in that same year, they used their human skills in traditional ways to once again craft products we all depend on. Work, work, work — we spend the better part of our lives on the job, be it in a factory or an antiseptic office, or somewhere else in the vast assembly line in between. Tireless photographer Lee Friedlander, the maniacally inclusive but blessedly nonchalant cataloguer of Americana — her monuments, jazz musicians, and urban landscapes — here presents 16 years of Americans at work. A collection of commissioned portfolios, some made at the request of art institutions, others at the behest of company CEOs, Lee Friedlander At Work also documents, albeit subtly, 16 years of one of America's most exceptional and hard-working photographers — at work.