Anthony Friedkin
Ex Post Facto
January 24 – March 7, 2026
Opening Reception:
Saturday, January 24th, 4-7pm
The Gay Essay
Hollywood
Los Angeles
Nudes
The Surfing EssayThe Gay Essay
Anthony Friedkin, Bobbie & Linda, Venice, CA
1970
Vintage Gelatin Silver Print
14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
signed on verso
$3700
Anthony Friedkin, Couple, Los Angeles, CA
1970
Gelatin silver print
10 x 8 inches (25.4 x 20.3 cm)
signed on verso
$1600
Anthony Friedkin, Divine, The Palace Theater, San Francisco, CA
1972
Gelatin Silver Print
14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
signed on verso
$2000
Anthony Friedkin, Don Kilhefner and Morris Kight at the Gay Community Services Center, Los Angeles, CA
1972
Gelatin Silver Print
14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
signed on verso
$2000
Anthony Friedkin, Gay Liberation Parade, Hollywood, CA
1972
Vintage Gelatin silver print
11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm)
signed on verso
$3700
Anthony Friedkin, Hustlers, Selma Avenue, Hollywood, CA
1971
Gelatin Silver Print
11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm)
signed on verso
$2000
Anthony Friedkin, Jim, East Los Angeles, CA
1972
Vintage Silver gelatin print
11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm)
signed on verso
$3700
Anthony Friedkin, May Doll, Gay Liberation Parade, Hollywood, CA
1972
Vintage Gelatin silver print
11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm)
signed on verso
$3700
Anthony Friedkin, Michelle, "C'est La Vie" Club, North Hollywood, CA
1972
Gelatin silver print
14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
signed on verso
$2000
Anthony Friedkin, Pristine Condition, San Francisco, CA
1970
Vintage Gelatin Silver Print
14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
signed on verso
$3700
Hollywood
Anthony Friedkin, Android Sisters Having Lunch, Universal Studios, CA
1978
Gelatin Silver Print
16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$3300
Anthony Friedkin, Film Can Library, Universal Studios, Hollywood, CA
1978
Vintage Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$5300
Anthony Friedkin, Four Clowns, from the film 'The Game', Palo Alto, CA
1997
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$3300
Anthony Friedkin, Jaws, Universal Studios, Hollywood, CA
1978
Archival Pigment Print
20 x 30 inches (50.8 x 76.2 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$5500
Anthony Friedkin, Skyline and Lake, Universal Studios, Hollywood, CA
1989
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$3300
Anthony Friedkin, Stage 27, Universal Studios, Hollywood, CA
1978
Vintage Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$5300
Anthony Friedkin, Stuntman Falling From Ceiling (from the film 'The Game' directed by David Fincher), San Francisco, CA
1997
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$3300
Los Angeles
Anthony Friedkin, Actors Mural, Hollywood, CA
1997
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$3300
Anthony Friedkin, Beverly Hills Chauffeur,Beverly Hillss, CA
1975
Vintage Gelatin Silver Print
16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$5300
Anthony Friedkin, Black Lives Matter Mural, Los Angeles, CA
2023
Gelatin Silver Print
20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$3300
Anthony Friedkin, Sonata (detail of Mural) Melrose Alley, Weho, CA
2023
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$3300
Anthony Friedkin, Woman by the Pool, Beverly Hills, CA
1975
Archival pigment print
20 x 30 inches (50.8 x 76.2 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on recto
$5500
Nudes
Anthony Friedkin, Annie's Blue Dream, Santa Monica Studio, CA
1978
Vintage Gelatin silver print
20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$5300
Anthony Friedkin, Maria on the Clothesline, Santa Monica, CA
1979
Gelatin silver print
11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$2000
Anthony Friedkin, Melody in Brothel with Mask, New York City
1992
Gelatin Silver Print
14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$2000
Anthony Friedkin, Portrait of Monica, NYC Brothel, NY
1988
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$3300
The Surfing Essay
Anthony Friedkin, Breaking Wave, Venice Beach, Los Angeles, CA
1978
Archival Pigment Print
20 x 30 inches (50.8 x 76.2 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$5500
Anthony Friedkin, Clockwork Malibu, Rick Dano on P.C.H., Malibu, CA
1977
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$3300
Anthony Friedkin, Andrea in the Ocean, Santa Monica, CA
1980
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$3300
Anthony Friedkin, Shimmering Wave, Venice Beach, Los Angeles, CA
2023
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$3300
Anthony Friedkin, Jay Riddle Skateboarding Point Dume, Malibu, CA
1980
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$3300
Anthony Friedkin, Silver Curl, Hermosa Beach, CA
2005
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Edition 6 of 25
signed on verso
$3300
Anthony Friedkin, Pacific Ocean Park Pier (P.O.P), "DOGTOWN", Venice, CA
1974
Gelatin silver print
20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$3300
Anthony Friedkin, Hokusai Wave Mural, Downtown Los Angeles, CA
1998
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$3300
Anthony Friedkin, Skateboarder Nadas Kaupas, Los Angeles, CA
1988
Gelatin silver print
14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$2000
Anthony Friedkin, Backstage at Surf Concert, "The Tops Off", Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Santa Monica, CA
1979
Gelatin silver print
11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm)
Edition of 25
signed on verso
$2000
PRESS RELEASE
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 at 310.559.5700 or by email at gallery@vonlintel.com.
Von Lintel Gallery
2525 Michigan Avenue, Unit A7
Santa Monica, CA 90404
gallery@vonlintel.com
Gallery Hours:
Wednesday - Saturday
from 12am until 6pm
