Life Still: Sixty Photographs by Lee Friedlander 

How does the United States seem, at once, so small and big, quiet and loud, phony and true? In Life Still (Aperture, 2026), Lee Friedlander brings together rarely seen and unpublished images from the past sixty years alongside new work, staging a visual dialogue between past and present. In doing so, Friedlander reveals 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 and exhibition about the enduring riddles of American culture. Curated by Sarah Hermanson Meister and Noa Lin, this exhibition includes 60 works that trace recurring visual motifs throughout the artist’s heralded career including pictures of pictures, windows and mirrors, signage (“Letters from the People”), and self-portraits.

Lee Friedlander (born in Aberdeen, Washington, 1934) is a photographer celebrated for his keen ability to capture the intersections of public and private spaces, as well as the complexities of American life. Friedlander’s work has been widely exhibited, including retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. His photographs are also included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Tate, London, among others. Friedlander is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, three Guggenheim Fellowships, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His numerous monographs include Self-Portrait (1970), The American Monument (1976), and Sticks & Stones (2004). His work has been published in Aperture, The New Yorker , The New York Times Magazine , and Time .

Sarah Hermanson Meister is executive director at Aperture. She worked in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for more than twenty-five years, where she curated acclaimed exhibitions on the work of Josef Albers, Brazilian modernist photographers, Dorothea Lange, and many more.

Noa Lin is associate editor at Aperture. He has edited books such as Lee Friedlander: Life Still , Richard Misrach: Cargo , and At the Limits of the Gaze: Selected Writings by Takuma Nakahira and assisted with numerous others. He is contributing editor to The PhotoBook Review in Aperture magazine. Before joining Aperture in 2022, he was an editorial assistant at Melcher Media. He holds a BA in studio art and English from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut.