Lee Friedlander At Work
by: Richard Benson and Lee Friedlander

Hardcover. NY, D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 96 pages. In the six photo essays compiled in this well-designed volume, widely admired American photographer Friedlander (e.g., The American Monument) presents images of factory, technology, and telemarketing workers. This visual workplace odyssey starts with "factory valleys" in Ohio and Pennsylvania in 1979 and ends in Omaha, NE, with "telemarketing" in 1995. Throughout, Friedlander centers his black-and-white photographs on the faces of individual workers-bored by repetition, firm in vocational resolve, or frozen for a moment in a physically demanding job. Benson (dean, Yale Univ. Sch. of Art) gives Friedlander a helping hand with a comforting afterword that connects these portraits of work with its reality. Maybe it is unfair to expect a collection of photo essays, commissioned by companies or art institutions, to show us something we never knew before, but a photography book succeeds or fails by its images. With no surprises to convey-we already know that many jobs are tedious and that the people stuck in them drift into a trance to get through the day-this book seems like an effort merely to expand the Friedlander bibliography.