Lee Friedlander has photographed his wife Maria every year of their sixty-eight-year marriage, and the full sweep of that obsession is now on the walls of Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco.

The show reads like a single, sustained act of attention. Maria in profile. Maria at the wheel. Maria holding their infant son. Maria dozing in the grass, in Paris, Santa Fe, Wales. Maria doing the crossword with their adult daughter, or reading the funny pages with a grandson. All monochrome, all recognizably "Friedlanders" — formally rigorous, with Lee himself often present only obliquely, his shadow stamped onto his subject.

The couple's origin story is compact. Lee ran into Maria at the Sports Illustrated offices, where she worked as an assistant — women weren't allowed to write for the magazine in 1958. He called and asked her to a Count Basie show at Birdland. "I went and — it never stopped," Maria told gallerist Jeffrey Fraenkel in 2019. Lee's version is shorter: "And that was it."

What do the pictures actually show?

More intimacy than much of Friedlander's better-known work. A 1974 camping-trip photograph from Colorado maps the family dynamic with uneasy precision: children at a picnic table on the right, Maria in dishabille meeting Lee's gaze from the back of the camper on the left, a look of sly complicity on her face.

The portraits also document time's relentless etchings. Maria's cheeks hollow. A furrow appears. Her black mane lightens and one day reappears cropped short. Later images — Maria reclining, legs splayed, or reviewing documents in her underwear — combine aging, eroticism and the mundane in a way that is discomfiting and forceful at once.

The word "muse" doesn't quite fit. Friedlander felt the compulsion to photograph long before 1958, and would have kept going regardless. "What's in front of me starts to get photographed. And Maria has been in front of me a lot," he told one interviewer, characteristically unsentimental.

How has the marriage survived?

Maria's own appraisal: "No matter what was going on, we always did what we said we were going to do." Lee, more than thirty years in, put it differently: "I'm certainly curious about Maria. I still am."

Maria's essays and interviews supply the access her husband's comic taciturnity withholds. She has compared looking back at his pictures of their shared past to "rereading a private journal," and she writes of a life not merely documented by the camera but molded by it. She recalls her discomfort after Lee's late-'70s Nudes series, when women they knew socially would brazenly ask him to photograph them naked.

One of those sitters was a then-unknown Madonna, in 1979. Those photographs later put the Friedlanders' children through college — Lee and Maria discovered their former nude model had become a famous singer when they went to see Desperately Seeking Susan.

Maria is drily hilarious on Lee's contemporaries, too. On Garry Winogrand: "Garry seemed happy as he said his third 'I do'" and "Garry never punched anyone in our house."

A quieter institutional detail: Lee made his first portrait of Maria with Walker Evans's camera.

How does the show end?

Fraenkel's installation mirrors the collapse of decades Maria has described in book form. The photographs on the gallery's main wall balloon outward in the fullness of midlife, then taper. The final portrait shows the couple's shadows, shoulders touching.

In her 2019 interview, Maria spoke bluntly about old age. Her eyesight was failing, robbing her of "one of the greatest pleasures of my life." Lee, she said, had retreated into his work: "The darkroom has become his cupola." Nearly everything has gone. Lee and Maria are still there, together, and so is his camera — which suggests the series, seven decades in, is not finished yet.