Anthony Friedkin

Anthony Friedkin (born 1949) is an American photographer whose works have chronicled California's landscapes, cities and people. His topics include phenomena such as surf culture, prisons, cinema, and gay culture. Friedkin’s photographs have been exhibited in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum. His photographs are included in major Museum collections: New York's Museum of Modern Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum and others. He is represented in numerous private collections as well. His pictures have been published in Japan, Russia, Europe, and many Fine Art magazines in America.

In 2014, The Gay Essay, which documents Californian gay culture during the late 1960s and early 1970s, was featured in San Francisco's deYoung Museum.

He has over forty years experience as a professional photographer. Anthony Friedkin has lived and worked out of his apartment studio in Santa Monica.

Early life and photojournalism

Friedkin was born in Los Angeles, California in 1949. For a time, he worked as a photojournalist working as a stringer for Magnum Photos in Los Angeles. During his career he taught photography at both UCLA and California Institute of the Arts.

Accomplishments He received a National Endowment of the Arts grant in 1977 and was given a special commendation by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley for his contribution to Fine Art Photography in 1980. In 1985, a subset of costume photography from the essay was displayed at the Nicola gallery in Los Angeles. In 1986, The Hollywood Essay was featured at the Min Gallery in Tokyo, Japan.

California Prisons: Incarceration: Images from Folsom Prison

In 2004, the work was displayed at the fine art gallery of Los Angeles Harbor College.

Ocean View: The Depiction of Southern California Coastal Lifestyles

In a series of photographs titled Ocean View: The Depiction of Southern California Coastal Lifestyles, Friedkin examined the mythology of California that has enticed people, industries, and money to the state over the past century. Many of the photographs document surf culture, showing it in the wider context of the imagery of the California Dream.

He made the twenty black-and-white photographs of his Wave Portfolio between 1977 and 2006, printing them in his own darkroom in Santa Monica. They show waves at Zuma Beach, Venice Beach, Hermosa Beach, La Jolla, Carmel, and Santa Monica.

Friedkin is a lifelong surfer and self-styled “disciple of the sea.” “Waves are like liquid sculpture,” he wrote, “when I’m in the water, I feel like I’m connecting to something so mighty and so primordial it’s amazing.”

The Gay Essay

In 1969, when Friedkin was 19, he began to chronicle gay life in Los Angeles and San Francisco, hoping to increase its visibility and gain a better understanding of gay culture there. The photo essay was captured in the years of sexual revolution, around the time of the Stonewall riots. While taking the portraits in informal settings such as hotels and bars, he often developed close relationships with his subjects. In 2014, Friedkin released The Gay Essay, a book containing 75 portraits from the series, published by Yale University Press. The publisher announced that the book is intended to be the first of several books containing photos from the series.

Friedkin began his work on the “Gay Essay,” when he was only nineteen years of age, and set out “to depict [the] struggles, humiliations, and [the] triumphs [of queer culture]". Friedkin’s goal was to document what it meant to defy the grain when it is wrong, that is to show the courage it takes to define one’s own freedom and individuality.

“The Gay Essay” was not shown in America for a long time due to the sensitivity of the images Friedkin produced and a less than receptive society whose mainstream was overwhelmingly homophobic, simply put, but was exhibited in Europe and East Asia and was received well. 2011: The Surfing Essay, Drkrm Gallery, Los Angeles 2011: TIMEKEEPER, Gallery 478, San Pedro 2014: The Gay Essay, de Young Fine Art Museum, San Francisco 2016: The Wave Portfolio: Photographs by Anthony Friedkin, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach 2016: Chronographs, Leica Gallery, Los Angeles 2017: Timekeeper, Christophe Guye Galerie, Zurich 2017: The Gay Essay, Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York

Group exhibitions Some of his group exhibitions are listed below: 2003: Surf Culture, The Art History of Surfing, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach (catalogue ) 2005: Inaugural Exhibition, Amador Gallery, New York 2007: The Seventies Revisited, dnj gallery, Los Angeles 2008: Love me, DRKRM Gallery, Los Angeles 2010: Inaugural Exhibition, Christophe Guye Galerie, Zurich 2011: Yea Big: small works, Cohen Gallery, Los Angeles 2011: In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945-1980, Getty Center, Los Angeles 2012: Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography, 1945-1982, Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs 2012: Camera Night at the Ivar, DRKRM Gallery, Los Angeles 2014: Road Trip: Photography of the American West, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, Bordeaux 2015: Drawn to Light, Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla 2016: Gallery Selections, Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla