At Work: Lee Friedlander

In the industrial north at the end of the 1970s, people were at work using hands and machinery to make things we all use. Less than a decade later, supercomputers were being made in Wisconsin while desktop computers were being used in Boston. In New York City in the early nineties, people were avidly trading at stock exchanges. In 1995, telemarketers sat at computers in Omaha, cold-calling potential customers, while in Cleveland, in that same year, human skills were once again put to traditional use to craft products we all depend on.
Work, work, work — we spend the better part of our lives on the job, in a factory or an antiseptic office or somewhere else in the vast assembly line in between. Tireless photographer Lee Friedlander, the maniacally
inclusive but blessedly nonchalant cataloguer of Americana — monuments, jazz musicians, and urban landscapes — presents here 16 years of Americans at work. A collection of portfolios commissioned in part by art institutions and in part by company CEOs, At Work also documents, albeit subtly, 16 years of one of America’s most exceptional and hard-working photographers — at work.