How bright the sunlight: on Lee Friedlander and the Western landscape

Lee Friedlander was born in 1934, when photography was less than a hundred years old. He is now over eighty, and if he manages to keep working for another fourteen years, he will have lived for the entire second half of the history of photography up to that point. He used a 35 mm camera for many years, producing tremendously innovative and visually rich pictures of rectangular shape, but then, in the 1970s, when he fell in love with the American West and pounced upon it as a subject, he switched