Lee Friedlander: Witness Number 6

"Lee and I have shared a number of unconventionally interesting friends during our five decades together, people who show us an unusual way of living a life. I would put Raoul Hague on that list, maybe at the top. Beginning in the mid 1960s and continuing for more than 25 years, Lee and I and our children visited him at the Woodstock, New York, cabin where he lived and worked. To enter Hague’s cabin was entering his universe. It was not simply a dwelling and a studio but a carefully organized way of life, a reflection of an esthetic ideal. All he did, whether work or pleasure, was driven by this ideal, which he created for himself and carried out without compromise. Hague was the quintessential storybook artist". — from the text by Maria Friedlander. Witness Number 6 provides a portrait – in 157 photographs by Lee Friedlander, and accompanying essay by Maria Friedlander – of the sculptor Raoul Hague. The Friedlanders knew Hague for over two and a half decades, and their deep fondness for, and mutual trust with, the Armenian-born sculptor comes through in every image and word of this gorgeous addition to JGS’s Witness series.