At Work

by Lee Friedlander (Photographer), Richard Benson (Afterword)

In the Industrial North at the end of the 1970s, people were at work with hands and machinery to make things we all use. In the mid 80s, in Wisconsin, they built supercomputers; at the same time, near Boston, they typed on desktop computers. In New York City, in the early 90s, people stood on stock floors, trading. In 1995, in Omaha, they sat at computers, cold calling as telemarketers; and in Cleveland, in that same year, they used their human skills in traditional ways to once again craft products we all depend on. Work, work, work--we spend the better part of our lives on the job, be it in a factory or an antiseptic office, or somewhere else in the vast assembly line in between. Tireless photographer Lee Friedlander, the maniacally inclusive but blessedly nonchalant cataloguer of Americana--her monuments, jazz musicians and urban landscapes--here presents 16 years of Americans at work. A collection of commissioned portfolios, some made at the request of art institutions, others at the behest of company CEOs, Lee Friedlander At Work also documents, albeit subtly, 16 years of one of America's most exceptional and hard-working photographers at work.

Genres: Art

96 pages, Hardcover

First published August 2, 2002

About the author

Lee Friedlander is a seminal American photographer known for his innovative images of city streets. Often featuring candid portraits of people, signs, and reflections of himself in store front windows, Friedlander’s street photography captures the unexpected overlaps of light and content in urban landscapes. “I’m not a premeditative photographer,” he has said. “You don’t have to go looking for pictures. The material is generous. You go out and the pictures are staring at you.”

Born on July 14, 1934 in Aberdeen, WA, he studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena before moving to New York in 1956. Influenced by the work of Eugène Atget and Walker Evans, he attempted to see things as if a step removed, spontaneously reacting to all the potential images in front of him. Along with Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, Friedlander was represented in the historic “New Documents” exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1967, curated by John Szarkowski. He went on to publish his acclaimed photobook The American Monument in 1976. More recently, in 2010, Friedlander published America by Car, a book which was accompanied by an exhibition at the Whitney Museum and featured a series of photos that were taken on road trips from behind the wheel of rental cars. The artist continues to live and work in New York, NY. Today, his photographs are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among others.

Reviews

[Alan Sundberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lee Friedlander is great, of course - the book is a good documentary of Americana and the theme Americans at work