Lee Friedlander’s “The American Monument” is a seminal exploration of the American social landscape, originally published for the 1976 Bicentennial. The book features 213 gravure-printed photographs selected from thousands of negatives taken over a decade of travel. Friedlander avoids heroic isolation, instead showing monuments as they exist in situ—dwarfed by telephone poles, obscured by street signs, or blending into suburban sprawl. Bound in a unique ledger-style with removable metal pins, the book itself functions as a modular archive of national memory and local idiosyncrasy.
