Lee Friedlander made a series of photographs in the public parks and private estates that were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903), North America’s premier landscape architect. Olmsted was famous for co-designing many well-known urban parks with his senior partner Calvert Vaux, including Central Park and Prospect Park in New York City.

Many of the photos show long, elegant branches or thick tree trunks in front of a bridge or other human-made structure; others capture the shadow that a majestic tree casts upon a large open field; and still others show sunlight filtering through the branches and leaves of a tree in full bloom. While the majority were taken in Central Park, there are also several from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Boston, Wisconsin, and upstate New York.

As is expected the frame is filled to bursting with sinuous, verdant branches and vines, often contrasted with the straight-edged confines of the parks and the buildings that seem to push in on them.
Lee Friedlander, Central Park, New York City, 1994

Friedlander is excellent at of building disorder into order or pictorial form. Nothing in the frame may be important, per se, in terms of its role outside the frame, but within the frame, everything plays a crucial role. He has a great ability to compress a complex image into the picture plane.