Lee Friedlander has been visiting Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and northern New Mexico since the late 1960s. The photographs in this volume come from later returns, made with his Hasselblad camera while he drove the back roads in an assortment of rental cars. The publisher describes a range of terrain: from the Plaza of Santa Fe through adobe-strewn neighborhood barrios and out into the high-altitude desert surrounding the city. The subjects are familiar to anyone who knows the region; the attention brought to them is not incidental.
What the book tests is Friedlander’s long-standing method. The publisher calls him a master at creating unity out of diverse shapes and complex tones within the two-dimensional picture plane, and these New Mexico pictures set adobe walls, open desert, and the edges of towns against one another in that same frame. The work belongs to the inquiry Friedlander has described as the American social landscape, pursued here in a place he has returned to for decades. The photographs were made on visits from 1995 onward, and the book presents them as a sequence rather than a survey.
Radius Books issued the volume in 2008 with the Andrew Smith Gallery. It runs 74 pages and carries 50 duotone images, bound in hardcover with a tip-on image at 11.25 by 12 inches. Emily B. Neff wrote the text and Andrew Smith the afterword; the photographs throughout are Friedlander’s. The supporting prose frames the sequence without displacing it, a division of labor worth noting in a book where images carry the argument.
For collectors of postwar American photography, the specific value here is a concentrated body of work in one region, made on repeated visits and shaped into a sequence. It is neither a retrospective nor a career summary. Friedlander’s engagement with the book as a primary medium is documented from his 1970 Self-Portrait onward, through volumes such as Apples & Olives and Cherry Blossom Time in Japan, and this project belongs to that sustained practice. The combination of a single geography, a defined period of return, and a considered physical format gives the book a clear identity within his extensive list of monographs.
