If I could be reborn to live a different life as a non-photographer, I might choose to be Katy Homans. One of the most influential and accomplished photography book designers of the last thirty years, Homans has worked extensively with Lee Friedlander; she hasn't designed all of his two-dozen-and-counting monographs, but a majority of them bear her name on the colophon. Homans designed America by Car. Just imagine the pleasure of feeling confident in suggesting to the artist that the endpapers and free flyleaves of his next book should be in several pearlescent shades of luminous automotive paint. And that those pages should also bear, in bold contrasting colors, Friedlander's chosen quotes and lyrics -- the epigraphic, sometimes enigmatic material that takes the place of lengthy curatorial statements in most of his books. And then imagine being able to mold a delirium of images into another entry in perhaps the singular catalogue of contemporary photography monographs. Not a bad gig for a designer.



Friedlander's outstanding productivity, particularly in the years since 1999 when he turned 65 and, he quips, "retired from everything but work," reminds me of John Updike's renowned logorrhea. Reviewing More Matter, Updike's fourth volume of collected essays and criticism, a New York Times writer observed:

He must have had an unpublished thought or two, but you couldn't tell it on the basis of the assembled evidence. Reviewing Odd Jobs [Updike's third collection] ... Martin Amis called him "a psychotic Santa of volubility," and after we agree - casually, perhaps enviously - that anyone who writes this much must be crazy, we can be more than grateful for the latest bag of gifts.*

Even in a constrained situation (here, the front seat of a car, or earlier, with his book Stems, a post-surgery convalescent bed) Friedlander shows no weakness in his capacity for transforming ordinary into extraordinary. There is a circular quality to this accomplishment; America by Car feels in some ways like a drive-by retrospective (Lee by Car, perhaps). There are people, places, phenomena he's made extensive projects out of before - monuments, portraits of friends, family, and self, car culture, landscapes lush and sere, architecture, assorted letterings. And signs, those impertinent, convention-busting signs pushing at the picture plane that first characterized Friedlander's pioneering vision in the 1960s. Here, Homans emerges as a hero once again; the last nine pictures in the book include eight images of "stop" signs followed by Lee, in an eponymous t-shirt, standing outside the driver's door, cable release in hand, snapping himself back home in New City (NY) in what can only be described as one of America's greatest photographic road trippers having seen the signs and ceased his imagistic psychosis (for the moment).




If I could express one other wish besides my Slade-Homans transference desire, it would be for a longitudinal survey of Friedlander's car-borne images. Prior to the earliest picture in this book, made (as were all the images in America by Car and the bulk of his post-1990 oeuvre) with the Hasselblad Superwide in 1992, Friedlander made many marvelous automotive landscape photographs with the Leica. Maybe it's a design challenge, or a conceptual challenge, to wrap products of these two machines together in a book. But it would be fascinating.



And I have one nitpicky cavil with the current book. As I read the images, I noticed that one of Friedlander's dashboards had a remarkably optimistic speedometer, topping out at 240. Could this have been a Montana rental, or Friedlander's turn in a Maserati? No, it turns out this picture was made in Ottawa, and those were kilometers per hour on the Canadian Hyundai, not MPH. Ottawa may lie south of Duluth, but it isn't really America, is it?

*William H. Pritchard, "His Own School of Criticism," published September 26, 1999, cited online


—George Slade