Lee Friedlander (born in Aberdeen, Washington, 1934) is a photographer celebrated for his keen ability to capture the intersections of public and private spaces, as well as the complexities of American life. Friedlander's work has been widely exhibited, including retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. His photographs are also included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Tate, London, among others. Friedlander is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, three Guggenheim Fellowships, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His numerous monographs include Self-Portrait (1970), The American Monument (1976), and Sticks & Stones (2004). His work has been published in Aperture, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Time.

Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker, professor of literature at Bard College, and author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (2016) and Stay True: A Memoir (2022), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2023.