"Lee Friedlander's America" by Hua Hsu

Few people have taught us to see America quite like Lee Friedlander. The 91-year-old photographer has been making pictures since the late 1940s, focusing largely on what critics and historians describe as the urban social landscape: all of these little jigsaw scenes of our built environment. He notices the everyday moments that go unseen by most, moments so inconsequential that we probably wouldn’t even bother dismissing them as mundane. Friedlander once distilled his approach into a simple ethos: “I just walk and see something interesting.”

Life Still, a monograph of Friedlander’s work that Aperture published this spring, collects photos from the 1950s to the present, and it’s in Friedlander’s careful placement of pictures side by side that these puzzle pieces begin to depict a meaningful and at times delightful whole. Looking at them is like noticing that the song you’re listening to catches the beat of a passing car, or seeing two strangers walk in symmetry on opposite sides of the street. You study Friedlander’s pairs, recognizing the rhymes across time and space. The only clues that date his wanderings arrive in the shape of a mid-century refrigerator, or a certain hairstyle, or a peeling political bumper sticker.

What Friedlander finds “interesting” is often ironic and devilishly funny. An archway marked ENTRANCE provides entry to no building, but rather to endless sky. You can imagine Friedlander’s glee when he happened upon a sculpture with a busted phallus standing next to a painting of the comic-strip character Wimpy chomping on a slender baguette.

Read full article at theatlantic.com