‘The pictures on these pages are in effect deft, witty, spanking little poems of hate. They are the work of Lee Friedlander, one of the most accomplished and sharp-minded of the younger American photographers. . . let it be said that pictures which are really doing their work don’t need words. Friedlander’s stinging and toughly amusing, bitterly funny observations want no line captions, and in this instance they had better be called just One, Two, Three, Five, and so on.’
Lee Friedlander’s The Little Screens photographs capture the growing ubiquity of television in post-war America and offer deadpan comic commentary on the vacuity of popular culture. Taken between 1961 and 1970, in locales ranging from Galax, Virginia, to Philadelphia, to Washington State, each photograph includes within its frame a television set illuminated with flickering moments of entertainment, advertising, or politics. Like the best of Friedlander’s photographs, The Little Screens images initially appear off-hand and casual. Examined more closely—and seen together as a series—they reveal a depth of sophistication. As Hilton Kramer wrote, Friedlander ‘has wrested from the accidents of experience some remarkable images—a kind of workaday surrealism that is ingenious in the incongruous forms it brings together, yet always faithful to a straight documentary surface. The little group of pictures showing television screens functioning in bleak, uninhabited rooms is unforgettable’ (The New York Times, 25 November 1972, p. 23).
Images from Friedlander’s series were first published, along with text by his friend and mentor Walker Evans, in the February 1963 issue of Harper’s Bazaar in a feature entitled ‘The Little Screens: A Photographic Essay by Lee Friedlander with a Comment by Walker Evans.’ The images made their unlikely debut in Harper’s Bazaar as the direct result of art director Marvin Israel’s effort in the early 1960s to replace traditional magazine imagery with edgier work by Friedlander, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and Andy Warhol, among others. Friedlander and Israel also worked together at Atlantic Records, where Israel was an art director and Friedlander provided photographs of musicians for albums and liner notes.
Recognition of the importance of The Little Screens was immediate. John Szarkowski included one of the images in his encyclopedic 1964 exhibition The Photographer’s Eye at The Museum of Modern Art. Szarkowski also included images like Tennessee and Somewhere like Washington, D. C., in his seminal 1967 New Documents exhibition. After Bazaar’s publication of Little Screens, Friedlander received a letter requesting to purchase Philadelphia from the series. Surprised that anyone would want to pay him $25 for a photograph, Friedlander met with the buyer: the artist Jim Dine. The two became friends and would later collaborate on the 1969 Photographs & Etchings portfolio.
The remarkable group of The Little Screens images offered here is the largest and most complete to ever appear at auction. The majority of the photographs are rare, early prints made close to the time of the negative. Of the few images printed later, it is likely that no early prints exist. No comparable set of photographs is believed extant in either institutional or private collections.
Lee Friedlander "The Little Screens" Flip Through from Pier 24 Photography on Vimeo.