"I might call myself an intruder," Lee Friendlander writes at the beginning of Self Portrait. In describing himself/his self as found "in the landscape of [his] photography," Friedlander notes that the self is seemingly dependent upon its context; self can only be defined or demarcated relative to everything it is not. And some of these photographs, such as pictures of bushes or windows in which only Friedlander's shadow registers as a "self," speak to this negative definition of identity. But identity is also physical, rooted in our bodies and other material signifiers, and other parts of Self Portrait speak to this reality as well. What thus comes across through the project is the difficulty of self-evaluation -- how are we to make sense of ourselves when we can't make sense of the world that both makes and excludes us -- which leads to the appeal of the self portrait. "There I am. That's me."

- Softcover in wrappers

- Unpaginated, 42 b/w photos

- 8.5 x 9.3 inches

- First edition, unnumbered (out of print)

- Haywire Press, New York, 1970