Lee Friedlander: Life Still

Lee Friedlander''s latest monograph captures the irony and complexity of American life, past and present.

Since the 1960s, Lee Friedlander has created incisive, often witty photographs of the American social landscape, shaping our appreciation of the quirks, charms, and idiosyncrasies of everyday life. In his latest monograph, Life Still, he brings together rarely seen and never-before-published images from his vast archive alongside compelling new work, staging a visual dialogue between past and present. From fractured, disorienting reflections in shop windows and car mirrors to deadpan observations of domestic scenes and street signage, Friedlander’s polychronic vision of American ubiquity is as comforting as it is alienating. Through the contradictions in the commonplace, Friedlander presents us with the enduring riddle of US culture: How does America seem, at once, so small and big, quiet and loud, phony and true? In Life Still, he reveals that these stubborn paradoxes of the American consciousness—the irony, humor, and self-conflict—remain as vivid today as they always have been.