Lee Friedlander coined a term for the subject of his work: the “social landscape.”
The great American documentary photographer, now 89, gives each row house and strip mall and mass-produced car a living and breathing personality. He frames places so as to imbue them with strangeness, movement, intrigue. He often makes what would normally be the background of a photograph the subject of a photograph. He does not treat American cityscapes as another photographer might treat a static mountain or an ancient river. He treats them like main characters—confused, chaotic, tragicomic, all-American characters.
More than 150 such images, captured from 1961 to 2022, are collected in the epic new retrospective Real Estate, published this month by the Eakins Press Foundation. The book ends with a play on a rider-on-the-trail image: a whole house being towed on a western highway, off to its next adventure. It begins with a play on a classic American beauty-queen photograph: A girl in a crown, sash, and white stole beams and waves at the camera. But she’s out of focus. Friedlander has us looking at the asphalt-shingle one-story home behind her.
Many of the images in this book contain such layering and texturing, characteristic of Friedlander’s photography: a child or an errant bit of debris in the foreground, a procession or an animal or a poster in the middle ground, a building under construction or a skyline or a grove of trees in the background, framed by a highway, riven by a telephone pole, hugged by a statue, seen most clearly in a mirror or through a window. Some of the images are stark: Places that are home to millions of people seem empty. Many are awkward. I am not sure how he manages to make a home look as if it’s posing awkwardly, but he does it again and again. This has the effect of making the houses look alive.
While soaking in the book’s images, I kept noting how often the only clue to when Friedlander might have taken the photo was the cut of a person’s pants or the style of their hat. (The boxy, low cars were a dead giveaway too.) Looking at the buildings, I was never quite sure. They have a timeless quality. That’s a credit to Friedlander, who makes every image feel jarring, fresh. But it was also a reminder of how many of those buildings are still among us today. This decades- and continent-spanning documentary of change reveals an American stasis. Our current housing crisis is due to our unwillingness to build, grow, and allow new life to come into our cities. Friedlander made the built environment look dynamic and alive; we cast it in amber. If only we saw those neighborhoods like he did.
Seaside, Oregon, 1972 (copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery)
Knoxville, Tennessee, 1971 (copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery)
Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1971 (copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery)
California, 1961 (copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery)
Oxford, Ohio, 1976 (copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery)
Left: Victor, Colorado, 2001. Right: Boston, Massachusetts, 1975. (copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery)
New England, 1981 (copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery)
Buffalo, New York, 1962 (copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery)
San Francisco, California, 1977 (copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery)
TORONTO – One expert predicts Ottawa‘s changes to mortgage rules will help spur demand among potential homebuyers but says policies aimed at driving new supply are needed to address the “core issues” facing the market.
The federal government’s changes, set to come into force mid-December, include a higher price cap for insured mortgages to allow more people to qualify for a mortgage with less than a 20 per cent down payment.
The government will also expand its 30-year mortgage amortization to include first-time homebuyers buying any type of home, as well as anybody buying a newly built home.
CIBC Capital Markets deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal calls it a “significant” move likely to accelerate the recovery of the housing market, a process already underway as interest rates have begun to fall.
However, he says in a note that policymakers should aim to “prevent that from becoming too much of a good thing” through policies geared toward the supply side.
Tal says the main issue is the lack of supply available to respond to Canada’s rapidly increasing population, particularly in major cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17,2024.
OTTAWA – The Canadian Real Estate Association says the number of homes sold in August fell compared with a year ago as the market remained largely stuck in a holding pattern despite borrowing costs beginning to come down.
The association says the number of homes sold in August fell 2.1 per cent compared with the same month last year.
On a seasonally adjusted month-over-month basis, national home sales edged up 1.3 per cent from July.
CREA senior economist Shaun Cathcart says that with forecasts of lower interest rates throughout the rest of this year and into 2025, “it makes sense that prospective buyers might continue to hold off for improved affordability, especially since prices are still well behaved in most of the country.”
The national average sale price for August amounted to $649,100, a 0.1 per cent increase compared with a year earlier.
The number of newly listed properties was up 1.1 per cent month-over-month.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
MONTREAL – Two Quebec real estate brokers are facing fines and years-long suspensions for submitting bogus offers on homes to drive up prices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Christine Girouard has been suspended for 14 years and her business partner, Jonathan Dauphinais-Fortin, has been suspended for nine years after Quebec’s authority of real estate brokerage found they used fake bids to get buyers to raise their offers.
Girouard is a well-known broker who previously starred on a Quebec reality show that follows top real estate agents in the province.
She is facing a fine of $50,000, while Dauphinais-Fortin has been fined $10,000.
The two brokers were suspended in May 2023 after La Presse published an article about their practices.
One buyer ended up paying $40,000 more than his initial offer in 2022 after Girouard and Dauphinais-Fortin concocted a second bid on the house he wanted to buy.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
