SFGate reviews the Friedlander show currently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

We accept an image such as “Nashville, Tennessee” (1971) as an instantaneous document of social reality because everyone in it – maybe even Friedlander himself behind the lens – appears taken by surprise. And because it appears to make no assertion about what it records, unless we care about the importance ascribed to highly coiffed hair at a certain American place and time.

But look at a recent picture, such as “New York City” (2002) in the Fraenkel Gallery’s concurrent Friedlander show, “America by Car,” and you realize immediately that his camera has constructed a moment of layered, colliding optical perspectives that the eye unaided could never assemble, let alone fix.

We might see “Friedlander,” the retrospective, as tracking a career-long disproof of any presumed equivalence between seeing the world and seeing the world as photographed. Yet Friedlander works as if he has no ideological stake in this truth, merely a fascination with it, a fascination continually reawakened as different subjects come before his camera.

Thru May 18…