The New Cars

"The New Cars 1964" reproduces a commercial assignment Lee Friedlander shot for Harper's Bazaar and then lost for nearly fifty years, a body of work that turns a car-advertising brief into a deadpan document of the American roadside.

In 1964, Bazaar art directors Ruth Ansel and Bea Feitler hired the young Friedlander to photograph that year's new car models. Rather than shoot the cars in glamorous settings, he had them delivered to parking lots by burger joints, cheap furniture stores, and a used-car lot, saying later, "I just put the cars out in the world, instead of on a pedestal." Bazaar's editor-in-chief, worried the pictures would scare off automotive advertisers, shelved them, and Friedlander did not rediscover the work himself until 2010. Fraenkel Gallery published this book the following year, with an introduction by Jeffrey Fraenkel: 72 pages, 3 color and 33 duotone illustrations, hardbound with a tipped-on cover image.

The rediscovery slots neatly into Friedlander's larger practice of turning assignment work and overlooked American subjects, cars especially, into some of his most enduring photographs.