CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/2/2023

Tragicomic absurdity and profound beauty in 'Lee Friedlander: Real Estate'

Featured spreads are from Lee Friedlander: Real Estate, launching Wednesday, October 4 at International Center of Photography in New York. Publisher Peter Kayafas writes, “In a Friedlander picture, the houses have personalities. The buildings look like they’ve been caught in the act of doing something embarrassing (Friedlander calls them ‘dumb’), and the empty spaces somehow embody an unlikely combination of irony and optimism. Of course, that could describe just a single Friedlander photograph. But there are 155 here, made over a span of sixty-five years during which numerous episodes of real estate boom and bust rearranged entire cities, towns and landscapes. … Friedlander has spent most of the past century photographing seemingly everything that people make and do in the space we have come to understand as the social landscape. The resulting photographs were born to outlast each instant in which they were made, and are likely to last longer than any of the individual people or buildings depicted in them. … Photography both embraces and denies mortality. There are ghosts in Friedlander’s real estate pictures—ghosts who remind us of the tragicomic absurdity of our own lives without once diminishing the profound beauty of being alive.”