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

How does the United States seem, at once, so small and big, quiet and loud, phony and true? In his first Aperture monograph, Life Still, Lee Friedlander (born in Aberdeen, Washington, 1934) reimagines the presentation of his oeuvre at age ninety-one, bringing together rarely seen and unpublished images from the past sixty years alongside new work to stage a visual dialogue between past and present. Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Hua Hsu observes how these stubborn paradoxes of the American consciousness— the irony, humor, and self-conflict—remain as vivid today as they always have been. By seeing contradictions in the commonplace, Friedlander presents us with a book of enduring riddles about American culture.