Lee Friedlander, who is among the most celebrated and quietly innovative living American photographers, is eighty-nine years old and was born in Aberdeen, Washington, a place once nicknamed the “Hell Hole of the Pacific.” A product of a generation that felt itself to have exhausted the utility of the documentary tradition of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, Friedlander’s work is distinguished instead by its humor, bracingly idiosyncratic composition, and prescience—his preoccupations over the years have included self-portraits, television screens, and commercial signage.

Friedlander was at the forefront, with Garry Winogrand and others, of the explosion in formally imaginative street photography that fused the deceptively happenstance arrangements of Cartier-Bresson with the Beat spirit and cross-country pulse of Robert Frank. “Within photography,” the artist Martha Rosler wrote of Friedlander in Artforum in 1975, “his work violated the dominant formal canons not by inattention but by systematic negation.” This notion of inattention was a not uncommon charge at the time—it was the insinuation underlying claims of a “snapshot” aesthetic, whose photographs were deemed to be too undertheorized, haphazard in their seeming banality. It must be said that Friedlander did less than his peers to dispel the idea, appearing at times even to embrace it in a mischievous sort of way: “Art is too big a word for me,” he said once. “It has too many letters in it.”

During the early days of the pandemic, Friedlander’s art dealer, Jeffrey Fraenkel, came to befriend his neighbor, the filmmaker Joel Coen, who, along with his brother, Ethan, has carved out a singular lane in the landscape of American cinema. Fraenkel would go on to propose that Coen delve into the Friedlander archives and curate a show guided by his own instincts: one iconic American artist’s take on another.

“What was interesting to me,” Coen told me recently, “was organizing a show around the formal aspects of his work, because so many of his exhibitions have been organized around subjects.” By formal aspects he meant the “complex and beautiful and even impossible” visual patterns he found recurring across the photographs, whatever their ostensible content. He located a peculiar continuity that defied any neat chronological arc—a propensity for dividing the frame in a kind of split-screen effect, for instance, and for ecstatic or unusually intricate reflections.

I asked Coen what he and Friedlander talked about while sifting through his catalogue. “We didn’t talk,” he laughed. “Lee is very understandably—and certainly understandable to me—resistant to explaining what he does.” I asked whether he found plausible Friedlander’s claim that these apparent patterns were largely accidental. (“Anything that looks like an idea,” he has said, “is probably just something that has accumulated, like dust.”) “I believe that’s the way he experiences his process,” Coen replied. “Obviously the photographs are so sophisticated and so consistent in terms of the things that are interesting to him that it’s not completely accidental. It comes from his own particular eye—from what catches his eye.”

“New York City,” 1964

“Seattle,” 1967

“Maria, Southwestern United States,” 1969

“Nashville,” 1963

“Tucson, Arizona,” 1995

“Tucson, Arizona,” 1970

“Livingston, Montana,” 1970