Lee Friedlander’s ‘The Little Screens’
The Wrap Book vol. 2: The Art of Television, 2024
Lee Friedlander’s The Little Screens
Commissioned by Stefano Tonchi for The Wrap Book vol. 2: The Art of Television
David Campany
Taking photos of our hotel rooms is a minor ritual most of us enjoy. It’s a way to mark our presence without marking the room itself, to which we lay only brief claim. Whether it’s for ourselves or to share with others, documenting our temporary surroundings comes as naturally as noting the fixtures and fittings. Bedside lamps. Mirrored closet doors. Impersonal tables, functional chairs, and bad art reproductions on the walls. But let’s face it, our photos are mostly as generic as those interiors.
Back in the early 1960s, documenting one’s hotel room was uncommon, but the photographer Lee Friedlander was making a habit of it. It wasn’t just the rooms that interested him. Each of his images included a television set broadcasting a face, or a random arm or leg. Muted and stilled by the camera, these ghostly emanations of the entertainment industry seemed to haunt the lonely spaces. At that time, photography was hardly being taken seriously as an art, and Friedlander’s witty but bleakly uncompromising efforts didn’t appear to be helping. But he was onto something and he knew it. For decades, his mentor, the photographer Walker Evans had been photographing the modern world’s growing addiction to the mass media. Edward Hopper, by then in his final years, was still painting the everyday sadness of hotels. Meanwhile, the emerging Pop Art was in thrall to trashy TV and the flood of disposable images. The time was right.
In February 1963, Harper’s Bazaar published a suite of Friedlander’s photos under the title ‘The Little Screens’. Amid the bright fashion imagery they looked especially eery. Walker Evans penned a pithy introduction:
The pictures on these pages are in effect deft, spanking little poems of hate […] It just so happens that the wan reflected light from television boxes casts an unearthly pall over the quotidian objects and accoutrements we all live with. This electronic pallor etiolates our bed boards and pincushions […] it is a half-light we never notice, as if we were dumbstruck by those very luminous screens we profess to disdain […] Here, then, from an expert hand is an account of what TV-screen light does to rooms and the things in them. The human denizens are purposely left out. In this atmosphere of eclipse, the sense of citizen presence is actually increased […] For the thousandth time, let it be said that pictures that are really doing their work don’t need words.
Television was the invasive ‘little screen’ dislodging cinema’s ‘big screen’ from the center of culture. Moreover, television was also trouncing the popular illustrated press. LIFE magazine, which had dominated American culture since 1936, folded ignominiously in 1972. Photography had survived the ascendance of cinema but, consciously or not, Friedlander seemed to be forcing it to contemplate the ubiquitous TV. Imagine him alone in those rooms, camera in hand, waiting for just the right screen image to flicker past. Silencing television’s noise and rendering it immobile, photography could have the upper hand, at least for a fraction of a second.
Lee Friedlander was young when he made these photos, but his star was on the rise. Today it is rising still, and if anyone can claim to be America’s greatest living photographer it is probably him. Not that he would presume such an accolade. He is also the least egotistical of artists, keeping his head down, making the thousands upon thousands of images that amount to a profound and unexpected chronicle of our strange times. His abiding fascination is with the hectic and cacophonous world. Its busy interiors and disorienting streets, the mish-mash of buildings, and the endless flotsam of consumer culture. But photography is an art of selection, and Friedlander is still finding angles and moments from overlooked life, to contemplate it, and even appreciate it.
Over sixty years on, those little screens still burn bright. Yes, we can assume almost nothing we see in Friedlander’s frames has survived the decades of built-in obsolescence and profit-driven renewal. So, there’s a nostalgia here, for sure. Even so, the sensibility Friedlander was expressing remains perfectly contemporary. We still visit hotel rooms, and they still have TV’s and bad decor. The screen images glow before fading from memory, as we head for the check-out desk.
