Tate Modern | Past Exhibitions

Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph. 5 June - 7 September 2003

Lee Friedlander
American, born 1934

Friedlander concentrates on what he calls ‘the American social landscape’, observing everyday life in the cities and suburbs in black and white photographs that are identified only by place and date. One of Friedlander’s abiding concerns is the world of work, something that is reflected in a commission to create a documentary record of the industrial hinterlands of Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Thomas Ruff
August Sander
Bernd and
Hilla Becher
Thomas Struth
Fazal Sheikh
Michael Schmidt
Robert Frank
Stephen Shore
Walker Evans
Nicholas Nixon
William Eggleston

Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Robert Adams
Albert Renger-Patzsch
Lee Friedlander
Lewis Baltz
Paul Graham
Garry Winogrand
Andreas Gursky
Boris Mikhailov
Diane Arbus
Rineke Dijkstra
Martin Parr

He produced images of the factory landscape before moving to the factory floor itself to picture the workers, creating powerful portraits in which machine-operators and their equipment are almost inextricable. In the mid-1980s, he was commissioned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to make a series of portraits of new technology workers, capturing the distinctive, concentrated ‘look’ associated with staring into a computer screen.