At Presentation House Gallery until February 8, 2015

In 2005, American photographer Lee Friedlander produced a gelatin silver print titled Banff. It’s on view at Presentation House Gallery in Thick of Things, an exhibition of works selected from across five decades of Friedlander’s impressive career. His Banff is definitely not a glossy postcard image of a tourist town whose picturesque main street climaxes in a spectacular view of Cascade Mountain. Nope, this is a black-and-white back-alley shot, the furthest thing from superlative-laden tourism. What you see are the butt ends of some ugly ’70s buildings, half-a-dozen parked cars, telephone poles, power lines, a stack of construction materials leaning against a wall, some scruffy weeds, a low fence, and, oh yeah, is that the top of a mountain in the distance? Fabulous nature all but erased by the relentlessly crappy banality of everyday life?

One of the most prolific photographers of our—or any—day, Friedlander was born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1934, studied with Edward Kaminski at the Art Centre College of Design in Pasadena, California, from 1953 to 1955, and then moved to New York, where he initially supported himself shooting images of jazz musicians for record jackets.

Early on, he was inspired by Eugène Atget, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans; by the late 1960s, he had cultivated his own distinctive style and was exhibiting at the Museum of Modern Art with Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus. Working in black-and-white with a 35mm camera, he became known for his “social landscapes”—unglamorous shots of urban life including street signs casting long shadows across bare pavement, shop windows reflecting shards of the surrounding city, and TV sets projecting big, blurry faces into small, dim rooms.

As PHG’s introductory panel tells us, “Friedlander’s images seem to defy photographic conventions. His fragmented compositions are full of obstructions, glitches, reflections and interruptions, and pictorial elements dissolve into one another.” Over the course of his long (and still productive) career, he has focused on a wide range of subjects both urban and rural, from factory towns to still-life studies and from desert landscapes to female nudes. He is also known for his ongoing project of self-portraiture, much of it taking the form of shadows and reflections.

Friedlander often works in series, and among the works on view here are “America by Car”, in which he uses the interior of a rental car—windshield, dashboard, side window—to frame the landscape; “The American Monument”, photogravures published in 1976 of some 200 monuments he shot across the United States; and “Blush, Sweat and Tears”, backstage shots of fashion shows taken in 2006 during New York fashion week. What is interesting about Friedlander’s treatment of monuments is the way he sees many of them as ignored by passers-by or dwarfed, almost erased, by their surroundings. From time to time, Friedlander also exercises a certain caustic point of view: for instance, what we see of a Minot, North Dakota, statue of Theodore Roosevelt on horseback is the horse’s ass. The fashion-week photos focus not on the clothing, models, or designers but on the frantically working hairdressers, makeup artists, dressers, and runway photographers.

Friedlander is also renowned for the more than 40 photographic books he has produced, and one of the pleasures of Thick of Things is the large number of them set out on reading tables for our perusing. Also on view are a few magazines to which he contributed photo essays, including a 1985 Playboy featuring a young Madonna in the all-together. Taken around 1979-80, when the entertainer was earning extra cash as a photographer’s model before fame, bleach, and Brazilians had come her way, these images are oddly revealing without being particularly alluring. Just as you would expect from Friedlander.