House, trailer, sign, cloud - Knoxville, Tennessee 1971; from: 15 Photographs by Lee Friedlander

The most striking, or intrusive, feature of this work is of course that triangular traffic sign, right at the front, in the center of the picture and photographed from behind so that we do not even know what kind of sign it is. An elegant little cloud is floating directly above and appears to be stuck to the sign. A sidewalk, starting bottom left, runs diagonally across the image, beside a road that disappears into the distance on the right. The other elements – caravan, trees, house, car – turn this relatively empty landscape into a rather banal scene. With this photograph, Friedlander is in fact very effectively demonstrating just how unstructured and alienating the American urban landscape can be and how objects, when photographed, enter into relationships that have nothing to do with actual reality. Friedlander became a photographer shortly after the Second World War. Together with Diane Arbus and Gary Winogrand, he exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967. The exhibition New Documents, curated by John Szarkowski, represented the breakthrough of a personal, apparently random, snapshot-like approach to capturing social reality, which was of great influence.