Lee FriedlanderThe American Monument
Photographs: Lee Friedlander
Text: Leslie George Katz
Publisher: Eakins
176 pages
Pictures: 214
Year: 1976
Sold
In an environment dominated by menacing speed, instability, advertising and television, the American monument plays a meditative role. A grace of intention shines through the ofttimes awkward alliance of efforts that produced them. They are redeemed by the confidence they express in the worth of the act memorialized. In this album the viewer and the viewed hold each other in balance. A world buried alive in our midst is unearthed to us. The photographer has brought it to us to see.
All doctrines, all politics and civilization, exurge from you,
All sculpture and monuments, and anything inscribed anywhere, are tallied in you,
The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records reach, is in you this hour, and myths and tales the same,
If you were not breathing and walking here, where would they all be?
–Walt Whitman
