"Lee Friedlander Is Funny. Seriously." by Arthur Lubow

At 92, Lee Friedlander is a reigning master of street photography. One morning in the spring, I sat in the comfortable kitchen of his shingle-and-stone house in New City, N.Y., and flipped through the pages of “Life Still” (Aperture, 2026), the most recent book of more than 60 he has published. (The title plays off “still life” and “still alive.”) Whenever I asked what made him take a particular picture — what made his shutter click — his answers were consistent. “It’s really funny!” he would say. With the clear implication that I’d have to be dense not to see that.

Humor isn’t necessarily the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of Friedlander’s photographs. Critics usually remark on the formal elegance that he often captures on the fly — how the frame might be divided vertically by poles or posts; the way shadows play on sunny ground; or the mix of reflections and transparency on plate-glass windows. There’s so much going on that it can take a moment to see the order he is making out of chaos.

“Photographers don’t have much to say,” he remarked — and he himself is noticeably taciturn. “We don’t make anything. We find things.” But composing this book allowed him to comment, without words, on what he had discovered.

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