The Little Screens

by Lee Friedlander

This Special Edition of 100 is signed & numbered. "The Little Screens" is a revered and influential body of early work by Lee Friedlander, but it has never before been brought together in its entirety. The book's title refers to the television screens housed in motel rooms and other nondescript rooms of anonymous character spread throughout the country during the 1960s. Each screen vividly transmits images of popular culture icons, political figures, or minor celebrities of the times. The environments are iconographic ghost-rooms filled with bland furniture-rooms without personality, rooms that could be, and are, anywhere and everywhere. "The Little Screens" and their environments weave a narrative of a peripatetic photographer moving through the landscape of 1960s America, and the melancholy, yet sometimes comic quality of life lived on the road. They provide a look at the 1960s as so many people saw beamed into their televisions and flickering across their living rooms. The book's preface was written by the legendary Walker Evans after he saw the photographs in 1963. Foreword by Walker Evans. Walker Evans is a legendary American photographer best known for his iconic work for the WPA in the 1930s, as well as his collaboration with writer James Agee on the book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men", though his career spanned many decades. A major retrospective of his work was organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2000, generating several publications and spawning a new enthusiasm for his work. 34 duotone illustrations 9.5 x 9.5 inches

96 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

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.