Lee Friedlander has been recognised as an important and influential photographer since the 1970's with exhibitions at leading galleries and museums world-wide. The first edition of this book, published in 1970 by Haywire Press, is a long unavailable classic, and the publication of this second edition will be greeted by many.

Friedlander, working with a 35mm Leica rangefinder camera in the 1960's, invented (with others, notably Gary Winogrand) a new genre in photography which he tentatively called `the social landscape'.

His photographs were largely taken on the city streets and interiors and involved the interaction of people and their environment and also their incorporation into it. Self Portrait defined this genre and set an agenda for a generation of photographers. Previously the paradigm for photography on the street had derived from photojournalists in general and Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank in particular. Cartier-Bresson's photographer was the invisible man catching his subjects unseen; with Frank we got a more personal record of his reactions to the scenes he encountered in his stream of consciousness trip across America.

Friedlander took his insights a step further, making his presence explicit in each of the pictures in this work. Self Portrait is not what you might expect from the title; only one or two of the fortynine pictures show anything approaching a formal portrait of the artist, and certainly none are taken in a studio.

Friedlander used a number of strategies to include himself in the images; in some we see his reflection in the mirror of a hotel room or van; a shop window reflects both his image, eye to camera, and the scene behind him. He angles the camera down to include his feet, or turns it back on himself from arms-length and even occasionally seems to make use of a self-timer. Often his presence is a shadow - of his head on the back of a woman in the street or curiously truncated on a chair in a shop window where it joins the reflection of his feet.

Friedlander makes great use of the `mistakes' of photography, such as the inclusion of his own shadow, or `false attachment' in which objects can be joined - in one a triumphant statuette exults from the top of his shadow head. All of the pictures in the book are clever and some are extremely witty. Some of them made me pick up a camera and rush out and try some similar things when I first saw them in the seventies, which was perhaps the best way to realise what a good photographer Friedlander was. If you don't know his early work, you will find this exciting - and will come back and thumb through it again frequently. If you know it and didn't buy the first edition you will already have decided you must have this one.

Thanks to Richard Benson who made the duotones it is excellently reproduced and one bonus over the first edition is an afterword by John Szarkowski who is as to the point and articulate as ever. Highly recommended.