Von Lintel Gallery is excited to announce “Ex Post Facto”, a retrospective of the photographs by Anthony Friedkin.
Working exclusively in full-frame black-and-white, Friedkin has spent more than five decades using the camera as a tool of personal discovery, embedding himself within the worlds he photographs. A native of Los Angeles, Friedkin began photographing as a child and was printing his own work in the darkroom by age eleven. That early immersion established a lifelong devotion to the photographic object as something made, handled, and resolved by craft and creative intentions.
The exhibition brings together selections from several of Friedkin’s most significant photographic essays. Across the gathered series (as well as in an iconic eponymous portfolio), the city of Los Angeles itself remains a generative force—neither just a backdrop nor the hometown for our hero, but an organizing condition for an entire art practice. LA has the power to structure how bodies move, how desire circulates, how the landscape asserts itself as a protagonist with a taste for secrets and paradoxes, and how joyful living and risky business blur endlessly together.
The Surfing Essay forms a central axis within the retrospective. Begun in 1975, it functions as both a visual diary and sustained inquiry into obsession, risk, and ritual. Friedkin photographs surfing from inside its physical and psychological demands, tracing wave after wave with a clarity shaped by personal obsession as well as formal and documentarian curiosity. The ocean becomes a testing ground for endurance and devotion, its power rendered through scale, motion, and the photographer’s own participation. Completing the exhibition are photographs drawn from Friedkin’s work in brothels and other private interiors, where eroticism is approached without moral distance or aestheticized detachment. These images insist on presence—on bodies situated within real spaces, under real conditions—expanding the retrospective’s storyline of the photographer as the most intimate witness.
The Gay Essay, begun in the early 1970s, stands as a landmark body of work—an insider’s chronicle of gay life in Los Angeles before visibility became codified, photographed with trust and unguarded tenderness. The images resist both sentimentality and distance, operating instead through shared space and mutual recognition, the subjects existing as collaborators rather than symbols. In the Hollywood series, illusion and hard labor coexist within the same frame. Actors, costumes, sets, and offstage moments reveal a system built on transformation and repetition, where identity is provisional and performance never fully stops. Hollywood after all is not—or not only—a fantasy, it’s also a workplace. Text by Shana Nys Dambrot
Friedkin’s photography has been exhibited internationally since the 1970’s and is in the permanent collections of the Getty Museum, the George Eastman Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and in San Francisco, to name a few.
For additional information or visual material please contact the gallery by email at gallery@vonlintel.com.
