I don’t own a truck. I’ve wanted one, off and on over the years, but the circumstances — financial, familial — have never quite coalesced in the right way to make it happen. The kind of truck that would be ideal for me is a small truck, like an early Ford Ranger or Chevy S-10, but alas I’m not alone in this desire, and supply is limited. These days, in my area of cow-country New York, you need upward of $10,000 for a rusty 4x4 Ranger with well over 100,000 miles on it. The old Tacomas have all been hipsterfied, as have the candy-striped 80s F-150s. It’s not that I love Rangers, which aren’t reliable or powerful or good-looking. It’s that I’m somewhere on the border between lifestyle and utility, and I don’t want a midsize or oversized honker. I drive a rusting early-aughts Mercedes station wagon and I don’t enjoy sitting high over the road. What I want in a truck is a way to bring sheets of plywood home from the lumberyard and get my attic junk to the dump, haul the firewood up to the shed, maybe take the dog to the trailhead, pop down to the inn for a beer, and pick up my daughter from school.

Chickens are mostly to blame. Let me explain this. The American postwar period saw a boom in industrial chicken production that made the “broiler” a cheap staple of the American diet. Feed mill, hatchery, and processing operations were consolidated into vertical systems. Breeding led to more meat per bird; technological innovation increased profit. Once all these systems were in place, the National Broiler Council was founded to interface with the USDA and organize advertising and exports. Cheap surplus frozen chicken (30.5 cents per pound in 1962) flooded the western European market where poultry prices plummeted as a consequence. The Dutch accused America of dumping; the French effectively banned the import on the shaky grounds that hormone additives would emasculate them. The newly created European Economic Community then shut out American industrial chicken producers through its Common Agricultural Policy, setting a minimum price of 33.3 cents per pound and imposing a 2.8 cent surcharge, which made American chickens 50 percent more expensive and lost them 75 percent of their market share.

This is early 1960s America, winner of the Greatest Conflict, though. Our chicken farmers — they should be called meat manufacturers — weren’t about to let $28 million worth of exports suddenly run dry: We’re talking about hundreds of millions in today’s dollars. A year and a half of shuttle diplomacy, spearheaded by chicken-proud Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright from his perch on the Foreign Relations Committee, was ultimately unsuccessful, and at the end of 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson, invoking one of the signature documents of the postwar global order, the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, imposed huge 25 percent retaliatory tariffs on an odd-looking mix of European exports that amounted in value to what our chicken farmers were losing: potato starch, brandy, dextrin, and — the payoff — “automobile trucks valued at $1,000 or more.”

This was American politics at its finest. Turns out, the United Auto Workers had Johnson by the balls before the 1964 election and could threaten his civil rights agenda with a looming strike. American car manufacturers didn’t like the very popular Volkswagen Type 2 light truck, which looks like surfer/hippie camper vans but with a flatbed back end. Instead of outcompeting the Germans, the Americans wanted them off the playing field entirely.

Result: The small, super-practical VW trucks disappeared, along with a bunch of other great little trucks from Toyota, Datsun, Isuzu, Mazda, and others. Playing solitaire, by some estimates the Big Three automakers (Ford, GM, Chrysler) topped out at 87 percent of the domestic light-truck market. Was this because their product was 87 percent better than the stuff the rest of the world was making and using? No. And the lack of competition in the small-truck line not only allowed US carmakers to push consumers toward larger, more profitable, more gas-guzzling, less regulated platforms, but kept them from innovating or marketing small trucks at all. The myth of the truck as advertised during NFL games and crooned about on pop-country radio, of the unencumbered American freedom wagon — towing boats, driving cattle across the fruited plains, flouting all the rules in a cloud of dust — is in fact the product of a postwar regulatory web from which it seems increasingly impossible to unentangle ourselves.

And yet, trucks retain their place in the classical American mythos. Nowhere is this more evident than in Pickup, a new photo book from the German art publisher Steidl Verlag, part of a series of themed monographs based on the photographer Lee Friedlander’s prodigious archive. Workers and other portrait series present his view of humans in their native habitats. Chain Link and now Pickup are more about that habitat, what Friedlander calls the “social landscape,” featuring images that, with a few exceptions, are devoid of specific people, just the quiet, sometimes eerie evidence of their presence — which, you could argue, is a good way to describe the modern American regulatory framework.

A few words about the 89-year-old Friedlander, whose longevity — he first shot for money at age 14 — and prolific output may have contributed to a dilution of his standing in the pantheon of postwar American photographers, even if he is venerated as a master on the level of Winogrand or Arbus, and, last we heard, still at it in the darkroom (“I love working,” he told the New York Times in 2023). Distilling two artistic ideas became his signature, beyond the seemingly impossible compositions he achieved by the strength of his presence on the streets of America. The first is his explicit subjectivity, his expansion into the space behind the lens where he resides, through things like the inclusion of his own shadow or reflection. The radicalness and influence of this shift away from photography’s supposed objectivity, to the feeling of being led through the world by a singular perspective, can’t be overstated. The second is his idea of the social landscape.

Friedlander’s black-and-white pictures of trucks span 1963 to 2016 and Alaska to NYC, Arizona to Wisconsin’s Chippewa Falls, urban and rural, and together they paint the entirety of the Cold War era of American entrepreneurialism, growth, and decay — the same period of The Chicken War that played such an unexpected role in defining his subject. Shooting from a standing position, the photographer fills the bottom half of the photo with the angular contents of truck beds in sunny spots, framing the mishmash of architectural and advertising shapes across the top half as American dreamscape skylines. Large keywords on stores and billboards create modernist poetry: REFRIGERATE, DIESEL, BEER, RYDER, C-SH, FULL SERVICE, KINKY for Governor of Texas. The images are formalist compositional studies in geometric lines and shapes. They also document miniature domestic love affairs: the truck as mobile home, trusted companion, coworker, carrier of what looks to you like junk but to the owner is everything. Who that owner is, you are invited to imagine.

Here’s a caged tiger in the truck bed; here three rumpled dogs, one with a knowing look; here a giant inflatable rat. The objects in the bed, in the setup of its context, are the punchlines to wry visual jokes. In Houston the setup is the anodyne office parking lot above; the punchline is a lone toy six-shooter in the truck bed below. You can almost hear Friedlander giggling. In Washington, DC the angle of the truck bed points to JESUS, but in the beat-up bed is a titanic monkey wrench — which of the two is going to fix this broken-down world that we are heir to?

That American truck bed also says: There’s nothing that can’t be fixed, with the right tools. Rummage in this pile of old parts and you’ll find the thing that might hold it all together. Sure, there’s a church steeple in the background, but the paint cans pushed up against the cab end of that truck bed might do more. As soon as I can round up some money, it seems to say, I’m going to put that lacquered spray coat over those buffed rust patches. I’ve got a sawhorse, ladders, a broom, a watering can, pickaxe and shovel, basketball and rope, air ducts, a plunger, some muck boots, empty Dr. Peppers, a gas can, and a crushed pack of Marlboros — I can do anything. And if the wheels come off, there’s a tread-worn spare in the back there, not tied down. She’ll do in a pinch.

Ultimately, Friedlander’s view of the truck aligns more with mine, and we may be in the minority with our romanticization of the older, smaller form. In one image in Dallas, Texas, from 1976, a pair of white trucks are parked side by side. Friedlander positions a half-moon coin-operated 12-hour parking meter between them. Spelled out across the tailgates of each truck, in the iconic sans serif fonts of their respective brands, are simply CHEVROLET and FORD, as if these were the only two choices for American ways of life. 

There is a third choice, though. Japanese manufacturers, collateral damage in the North Atlantic dispute, sought ways to circumvent the import hurdles laid against them in The Chicken War by taking an ontologically Zen approach (Ah, but when is a truck not a truck?). Subaru’s Brat, for example, a car with a cargo bed (aka “a truck”), had two rear-facing belted seats and some carpeting in the back, in order to be classified as a passenger vehicle. Another way to not be a truck is to just be a box of parts that could be a truck. This led to Mercedes, Toyota, Nissan, Suzuki, and Honda building assembly plants in the US, Canada, and Mexico, later protected from tariffs by NAFTA. For two decades, Ford Transits were imported with seats that were ripped out and destroyed before the cars were sold off the lot as cargo trucks, which led to Customs and Border Protection going after the automaker for nearly $250 million in back-tariffs. More recently, the Indian company Mahindra imagined shipping “kits” that skipped the plant altogether and left the assembly to the buyer — an Ikea truck, complete with ideograms and a hotline for missing parts. 

Of course, the fact is that trucks today are indeed passenger vehicles: Recent surveys showed that 87 percent of truck owners use them for shopping and errands, and just 15 percent use them primarily for work. Whereas trucks used to have a long bed and small cab, now they have long cabs and small beds. And while other countries have mass-produced huge fleets of small, efficient, practical, easy-to-fix, reliable, and capable cargo vehicles and superlight trucks, which took over the work of donkeys and mules in urban and rural settings alike, Americans have no access to these useful vehicles unless they engage in a customs-busting hijinx or collect them as a hobby. Not just because their import is complicated and expensive, but because of federal and state emission, safety, and fuel-efficiency standards. 

As it happens, one of the handful of East Coast importers of the Japanese right-hand-drive variety of these donkey carts has set up shop in a local town near where I live. The smallest, known as kei trucks, are adorable 600cc 4x4 little chuggers like the eighth and ninth-generation Suzuki Carry, which go for $4,000–$6,000 depending on their condition. They are all at least 25 years old, to be grandfathered out of emissions testing (not that they pollute); come clean of import duties; and are well cared for by their former Japanese owners. Yet they cannot be registered or plated at the New York DMV because no regulatory category can accommodate them: They are too small to be a truck, too big and enclosed to be a motorcycle, not quite a car, too useful, dare I say, to be allowed — even if no regulation currently prohibits right-hand-drive cars on public roads in the United States. Connecticut, Maine, and Montana will plate up these kei-class mini-trucks, but the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, which otherwise tries to do the equivalent of federalizing and reciprocating state motor vehicle regulations, can’t seem to get its shit together on this one.

This dealer, after trying and failing to get our useless local state senator to lobby on his behalf, has taken to selling most of his imports to Connecticut residents — “Which is nothing but New York making sure I pay no sales tax to them,” he said. When I suggested throwing a farm triangle on the back of the cab, he explained that you could tool around that way, sure, like it was a tractor, a quadrunner, or an Amish horse cart, staying under 30 MPH on the shoulder of the highway. But as far as he was concerned, that was no solution. He wanted to sell these useful vehicles fair and square, as trucks. 

That’s America, I told him. She makes the rules. Lots of them, more and more of them. They trickle down to individual lives in peculiar ways. Then you figure out how to wiggle, twist, and finagle your way through and around them, to accommodate a version of freedom you can live with.

Meanwhile, rumbling down the pike like a 60s sci-fi villain robot is Tesla’s Cybertruck, the avatar of an inhuman future sharp and cold as stainless steel. In this I envy Lee Friedlander that his life will be over before we feel the unintended consequences of regulating Elon Musk.