The new “Lee Friedlander: America by Car” exhibition opened last week at the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC with 192 arresting photos. Friedlander creates indelible portraits of everyday Americana, shooting  deceptively casual-looking scenarios in black and white.

Driving across most of the country’s fifty states in an ordinary rental car, master photographer Lee Friedlander  applied the brilliantly simple conceit of deploying the sideview mirror, rearview mirror, the windshield, and the side windows as picture frames within which to record reflections of this country’s eccentricities and obsessions at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Friedlander’s method allows for fascinating effects in foreshortening, and wonderfully telling juxtapositions in which steering wheels, dashboards, and leatherette bump up against roadside bars, motels, churches, monuments, suspension bridges, essential American landscapes, and often Friedlander’s own image. Presented in the square crop format that has dominated his work in recent series, and taken over the past decade, the images in America by Car are among Friedlander’s finest, full of virtuoso freshness and clarity, while also revisiting themes from older bodies of work.

 The show runs only until November 28th.