The history of modern art photography is, to a great extent, the history of the tension between the painterly photograph and the snapshot. For decades after its beginnings in the mid-19^th century, photography was a (seemingly) simple matter of recording the visible world. That changed with Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), who made photographs that had all the formal compositional qualities of a canvas by Cézanne. With the advent of the hand-held Leica camera in the mid-1920s, photographers acquired the capacity to go out into the world—updating the 19^th-century flâneur—to try to capture that instant when visible reality itself seemed to yield an artistic result. This was what Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) famously called "the decisive moment." Yet such pictures risk prettifying what they document. And "documentary" snapshots are vulnerable to the pitfall of the easy social or psychological irony. Lee Friedlander's photographs almost always play with this tension between imposed and captured poetic meaning—between, for example, the painted figure of "Rome" and its dozing man's dangling limbs. This makes even Friedlander's occasional failures dramatic commentaries on the nature of seeing and of apprehending what you see.