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Lee Friedlander At Work
September 10 - December 11, 2005
(above: Lee Friedlander, Boston, 1985, from MIT, gelatin silver print, on loan from the artist courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco)
For the past five
decades, Lee Friedlander has chronicled the American social and cultural
landscape. Friedlander, one of the foremost photographers of the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries, is known for his keen depictions of the worlds
of jazz, of television, of urban landscapes and deserts, and of family.
And 
throughout his prolific
career, Friedlander has acknowledged the largely anonymous worker, making
inventive pictures of the familiar, humdrum, yet overriding role of work
in America. (right: Lee Friedlander, Canton, Ohio, 1980, from
Factory Valleys, gelatin silver print, on loan from the artist courtesy
of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco)
On view this fall at the Spencer Museum of Art, Lee Friedlander At Work comprises those images of Americans on the job. The exhibition, which opens September 10 and will remain on view through December 11 in the Kress Gallery, presents photographs Friedlander made over a sixteen-year period, from 1979 to 1990, his lens bearing witness to a paradigm shift in nine-to-five America. Through six photographic series that were commissioned by museum curators, magazine editors, foundations, and businesses, Friedlander explores the saga of the American worker. These images not only witness and document the radical change in the American workplace from blue collar to desktop, but also invite us to appreciate Friedlander's profound contribution to photography through one constant thread, the ubiquitous universe of work.
Prior to its presentation at the Spencer Museum of Art, Lee Friedlander At Work was on view in three major European venues in Cologne, Amsterdam, and Paris. The Spencer is one of just three venues in the United States to host the show. All works are gelatin silver prints, on loan from the artist courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
John Pultz, curator of photography for the Spencer, has long admired Friedlander's work and calls it "terribly important to photography of the last 40 years."
"I think that the photographs in this exhibition are among his strongest," Pultz says. "I saw the Factory Valley pictures when they were first made in the early 1980s and was blown away by them. They made me realize that Friedlander was not just a formalist, but also a thoughtful social observer. His images from that series of factory workers are at once sympathetic and intelligent, the best pictures I know of this subject. I also wanted the show here because its pictures of people working at computers are the first works of art I know of that reflect back to us what for many workers has become the way we spend our days, with eyes glued to unmoving computer screens. I thought that a university was an ideal place to think about the changes in work that Friedlander so eloquently describes."
Friedlander was born in 1934 in Aberdeen, Washington, and
now lives in New York State. In 1963 George Eastman House mounted his first
one-person exhibition, and in 1967 his work was included in the watershed
exhibition New Documents at the 
Museum
of Modern Art in New York City. Friedlander's pictures, which have been
exhibited ever since, are in key photography collections, both public and
private. He has received the MacArthur Foundation Award, three Guggenheim
Fellowships, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. A major
retrospective, including more than five hundred photographs, was mounted
earlier this summer at the MoMA. (left: Lee Friedlander, Cray,
1986, gelatin silver print, on loan from the artist courtesy of Fraenkel
Gallery, San Francisco)
At Work was organized by the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio, in partnership with The Photography Collection, SK Cultural Foundation, Cologne, Germany. The Spencer Museum of Art venue is funded in part by Dave and Gunda Hiebert, the Kansas Arts Commission, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
Programming
In conjunction with the exhibition Lee Friedlander At Work, artist David Rees will speak on the topic "Laughing At Work" on Thursday, Sept. 29 at 7 PM in the museum's auditorium. A reception and book signing, hosted by the Spencer's Student Advisory Board, will follow in the Central Court.
Best-known for Get Your War On, a comic strip that now appears in Rolling Stone, Rees combines public-domain clip art of generic office-cubicle workers with satiric dialogue to address an array of cultural, social and political issues. Rees's other cult-hit comic strips, all of which can be viewed at his website, include My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable and My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable. His lecture at the Spencer will draw inspiration from My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable, which will soon begin as a regular comic feature in The London Guardian newspaper. His comics and writing also have appeared in GQ, the Village Voice, LA Weekly, Jane, Blender, Bizarre, and Punk Planet. He is also a contributor to the Huffington Post. Rees, a native of Chapel Hill, N.C., and graduate of Oberlin College, lives in Brooklyn.
The lecture at the Spencer, which may include some adult
language and content, is informed and inspired by Rees's temporary-job stints
working in so-called "cube farms" for several large corporations.
This will be Rees's second visit to Lawrence in a year; last fall he spoke
to an overflow crowd at the downtown art gallery/art supply store, The Olive
Gallery.
Editor's note: RL readers may also enjoy these earlier articles:
rev. 9/19/05
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