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"The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age" by M.H.Miller, Brendan Embser, Emmanuel Iduma and Lucy McKeon

T Magazine - The New York Times

June 3, 2024

Black and white photograph of a woman sitting in front of a computer in an office, circa 1986
Black and white photograph of a woman sitting in front of a computer in an office, circa 1986

Lee Friedlander, “Boston” (1986).  © Lee Friedlander, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York

Lee Friedlander is best known for photographing America’s social landscape, from mundane street scenes in the Midwest to nudes of Madonna that were taken in the late 1970s. Between 1975 and 1995, he created six series of photographs depicting employees at different types of workplaces, including Rust Belt factories, a telemarketing call center and a New York investment firm. One of these series, commissioned by the M.I.T. Museum and produced between 1985 and 1986, looks at office workers in the Boston area who used desktop computers for their jobs. At the time, this was a fairly new development, but one that Friedlander presciently recognized would come to define not just corporate life but humanity itself.

Read full article at nytimes.com

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