Join ICP for a special evening celebrating the impactful work of photographer Lee Friedlander on the occasion of his latest monograph, Lee Friedlander: Real Estate (Eakins Press Foundation, Fall 2023). Friedlander’s longtime book making collaborators Sharon Gallagher, Executive Director of Artbook | D.A.P., designer Katy Homans, printer Thomas Palmer, and archivist Stephanie Prussin join writer and moderator Rebecca Bengal for a conversation lending insight into Friedlander’s expansive career and bookmaking process which spans six decades and includes over 50 monograph books dedicated to the American social landscape. The evening will include a toast, a special display in the ICP library, and a book reception in the ICP shop celebrating Friedlander and his lasting impact on photobooks.

This program is being offered both in person at ICP and online. Tickets to attend the conversation in person are $5. Online tickets are available for free.

About the Book

Spanning nearly 60 years of the artist’s work, the Real Estate pictures emphasize one common thread in Friedlander’s complex response to what America looks like photographed. The conventional idea of real estate—land, buildings, construction, demolition—is exploded into a much more layered, varied, humorous iteration that includes ideas of hubris, failure, and mortality.

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).

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