Taking shots from a car is a particular tradition style of photography. We recall the familiar images of the flatlands of middle America and the iconic, much-photographed Route 66-style gas stations and motels. This is what we call a social landscape.

A notable practitioner is Lee Friedlander who uses the simple conceit of deploying the sideview mirror, rearview mirror, the windshield, and the side windows as picture frames within which to record reflections of America's urban scape. In his America by Car monograph Friedlander takes a road trip through contemporary America.

Instead of finding ways to contain and organise the cacophony of the city within the four edges of a picture, he introduces a multiplicity of edges to an otherwise quiet scene – dividing it, complicating it, questioning it, enlivening it – and within the limits of the viewfinder compiles a multifaceted “American social landscape”, a phrase unsurprisingly first coined by the photographer himself.

I have a lot of respect for Friedlander's sophisticated design, what he is able to pack into a picture frame, and the way that his photography both explores and define the social landscape and references of American photography’s own obsession with certain vernacular themes (roadside signage, humble buildings, car culture).