Kirjahaku

A superbly assembled survey of Friedlander’s abiding fascination with the American social landscape across six decades This volume presents 155 photographs spanning 60 years of the artist’s exploration of the built environment in the American social landscape. Collectively these photographs add to one of the broadest and most nuanced visual explorations of America, and, individually, they are filled with the kind of intellectual humor and observation for which Friedlander has become celebrated. Along the way, of course, Friedlander has expanded our ideas of what constitutes real estate, just as he continues to compel us to reconsider how photography reveals essential aspects of our lives over time. The mirror that Lee Friedlander holds up to us is his mirror and everything reflected in it has the common traits of his way of seeing—each picture is definitively a Friedlander picture. Real Estate is an essential collection of one of Friedlander’s lifelong subjects, and takes its place alongside other classic titles of his quest to photograph the ever-changing social landscape: The People’s Pictures (2021), Signs (2019), The American Monument (1976/2017), Letters from the People (1993) and American Musicians (2001).

With a healthy sprinkle of plastic and tinsel, Friedlander's visions of a commercial, uniquely American Christmas evoke both irony and nostalgia Whether or not you celebrated Christmas at some point during the last 70 years, you have no doubt encountered many of the scenes shown here in Lee Friedlander's eclectic black-and-white documentation of the holiday season across America. From city sidewalks to cookie-cutter suburbs, Friedlander captures it all: main street store window displays; plastic nativities on snow-covered lawns; inflatable snowglobes and Santa Clauses; questionable St. Nicholas–themed lingerie; oversize or underwhelming Christmas trees; and houses so covered in string lights as to demand nothing short of a miracle from the local power grid. As in all of his work, Friedlander's images of Christmas reflect his own version of the holiday. Is Christmas in America a religious celebration? A commercial precept? A misunderstanding? An indulgent blasphemy? Or all of the above? The only certain thing is that December 25 has provided an opportunity for the people's photographer to hold up a mirror to a flawed, inventive, preoccupied and wonderful society. Lee Friedlander (born 1934) has published more than 60 monographs since 1969. He was represented alongside Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand in the 1967 New Documents exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, now understood as a landmark event in American documentary photography, and received his own retrospective at the same museum in 2005. He has lived and worked in New York since 1956.