Lee Friedlander: Christmas

<p><b>With a healthy sprinkle of plastic and tinsel, Friedlander's visions of a commercial, uniquely American Christmas evoke both irony and nostalgia</b></p><p>Whether or not you celebrated Christmas at some point during the last 70 years, you have no doubt encountered many of the scenes shown here in Lee Friedlander's eclectic black-and-white documentation of the holiday season across America. From city sidewalks to cookie-cutter suburbs, Friedlander captures it all: main street store window displays; plastic nativities on snow-covered lawns; inflatable snowglobes and Santa Clauses; questionable St. Nicholas–themed lingerie; oversize or underwhelming Christmas trees; and houses so covered in string lights as to demand nothing short of a miracle from the local power grid.<br>As in all of his work, Friedlander's images of Christmas reflect his own version of the holiday. Is Christmas in America a religious celebration? A commercial precept? A misunderstanding? An indulgent blasphemy? Or all of the above? The only certain thing is that December 25 has provided an opportunity for the people's photographer to hold up a mirror to a flawed, inventive, preoccupied and wonderful society.<br><b>Lee Friedlander</b> (born 1934) has published more than 60 monographs since 1969. He was represented alongside Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand in the 1967 <i>New Documents</i> exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, now understood as a landmark event in American documentary photography, and received his own retrospective at the same museum in 2005. He has lived and worked in New York since 1956.</p>