Lee Friedlander once slyly assessed his promiscuous eye by saying, “I tend to photograph the things that get in front of my camera.” For Friedlander, this was in part a kind of formalist credo: his most innovative photographs are elegant spatial muddles, frames so stuffed to the gills that one imagines his hidebound camera-club contemporaries clutching their manuals in horror. But it was also, of course, an emphatic statement of fact. Like many of the pioneering American photographers of the middle twentieth century, Friedlander’s life in pictures meant pounding the pavement, and piling Kerouacian miles on his odometer in between. Now eighty-four years old, he once said that the longest he’s gone without shooting was the three months it took him to recover from a double knee replacement, in 1998. But the things that got in front of Friedlander’s camera weren’t always out in the wilds of the street. Sometimes, the consummate peripatetic photographed within the quieter confines of his home.

Like much of Lee Friedlander’s work, the ninety-seven photographs in his new collection, “Chain Link,” explore broad themes—sex, family, religion, race, nature—with striking wit. Friedlander has released previous series focussing on television screens, on the stems of flowers, and on the backs of heads, and his new book is similarly single-minded. In this series, which is made up of photographs shot over the course of around fifty years, the world is seen through the gray diamonds of chain-link fences. Using this zigzagging thread, Friedlander ties together scenes in distant cities and decades, and bends a ubiquitous, mass-produced object to frame a portrait of American culture.

Lee Friedlander’s “The American Monument” was first published in 1976. That’s “monument” singular, though one of the many singular things about Friedlander is that he’s nothing if not a pluralist. Whitman-like, he is great, contains multitudes. In an essay appended to the sumptuous new edition of this landmark work, Peter Galassi (who curated the 2005 Friedlander retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art) deems it “pointless” to try to count precisely how many books the photographer has published since 1976 before settling on roughly one a year. The retrospective was huge, and, inevitably, the accompanying catalog was almost too hefty to lug home comfortably. It was sort of monumental, though monuments tend to be erected to the dead.

As such, it is disconcerting to see the installation of Lee Friedlander’s prescient “The Little Screens” on the wall at Pier 24 in San Francisco, as 50 pictures are featured in “The Grain of the Present,” the current exhibition curated by Pier 24’s director, Christopher McCall. It’s interesting to view “The Little Screens” as the first artistic attempt to document television’s nascent dominance of America. The pictures were first shot in the early ’60s, when “Bonanza” and “Gunsmoke” were must-see T.V., and John F. Kennedy was president.