At Work & Play Lee Friedlander Hans van der Meer Documentary Photography

Work -- we spend the better part of our lives on the job in a factory, an office or somewhere else in the assembly line of service and commerce.

Over a period of 16 years, Friedlander captured American workers in locations as diverse as factories, offices, telemarketing centers and corporate offices. The images show the relationships between objects, people and places and reflect the mundane bits and pieces of our lives new, surprising and sometimes humorous ways.

Friedlander's photographs also reveal the secret of work, which is that work shapes who we become. Through the visual net of his lens, we witness changes in workers, in work and the evolution of the American workplace. Though Friedlander is known for his jazz musicians, urban landscapes and stone memorials -- the people and things that make up the American social landscape - -workers became an ongoing subject.

The six projects include Factory Valleys (1979-1980), manual labor in cities in Ohio and Pennsylvania; Gund (1995), blue collar steel workers in Cleveland, Ohio; Cray (1986) workers at first super computer in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin; MIT (1985-1986) computer workers on Route 128 in Boston; Dreyfus (1992), trading floor and offices in New York City; and Telemarketing (1995) in Omaha, Nebraska.

Lee Friedlander has had a distinguished career and is recognized as one of the most important photographers of everyday life in America. Among his many awards are a MacArthur Foundation Award, grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and three Guggenheim Fellowships. He has previously published dozens of books, among them the seminal Self Portrait and The American Monument, and more recently, American Musicians, Letters from the People, Little Screens, The Desert Seen and Kitaj.

See for Hans van der Meer Work & Play a Retrospective Photography ...

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