Western United States, 1975 (© copyright Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Eakins Press Foundation and Fraenkel Gallery) Lee Friedlander’s house portraits October 23, 2023, 7:31 AM ET 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 …