Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition The Little Screens. This marks the first time this influential body of photographs will be exhibited, and published, in their entirety.
The pictures, made in the 1960s, are of television screens housed in motel rooms and other rooms of anonymous character spread throughout the country. Each screen vividly transmits images of pop icons, political figures, or minor celebrities of the times. Walker Evans, writing about these photographs in a 1963 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, called them “deft, witty, spanking little poems of hate.” The Little Screens documents not only iconographic ghost-rooms filled with bland furnishings of the period, they also reveal an emerging reality—the omnipresence of TV screens and the drone of television voices and personalities to fill space in an increasingly isolationist culture.
Lee Friedlander’s distinguished career includes a MacArthur Foundation Award, three Guggenheim Fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has published many other books, among them Self-Portrait, American Musicians, and The Desert Seen.
This exhibition is accompanied with a fully illustrated hardcover catalog, published by Fraenkel Gallery, and including a preface written by Walker Evans.
This exhibit runs concurrently with Diane Arbus: A Box of Ten Photographs and Garry Winogrand: Public Relations.
