Canton, Ohio - 1980, Lee Friedlander; Richard Benson

Exhibition Label: "Art for Kansas: Building the Collection, 1988-1998 (Recent Acquisitions)," Nov-1998, John Pultz and Susan Earle Most photographs collected by this and other art museums are printed using photochemical emulsion on paper, with the resulting images rendered in continuous tones. Such hand-made photographs stand in sharp distinction to the many more photographs we see daily in newspapers, on products, and in ads, that are reproduced photo-mechanically, with ink on paper and made up of countless dots. In the limited-edition portfolio "Like a One Eyed Cat, Photographs by Lee Friedlander 1956-1987," the photographer has raised ink photographs to the level of art. Like Alfred Stieglitz and Alvin Langdon Coburn, two early twentieth-century photographers, Friedlander has used the photogravure process, which faithfully imitates the appearance of photographs, capturing a wide range of black and gray tones. Ink photographs such as Friedlander's "Canton, Ohio," are considered high-quality original works rather than reproductions. The limited-edition portfolio has been bound with screws, which allows owners to remove specific photogravures for exhibition without destroying the integrity of the book itself.