Philadelphia
Returned to lender
This work of art was on loan to the museum and has since been returned to its lender.Philadelphia is the earliest dated photograph from a celebrated series of television sets beaming images into seemingly empty rooms that Lee Friedlander made between 1961 and 1970. The pictures provided a prophetic commentary on the new medium to which Americans had quickly become addicted. Walker Evans published a suite of Friedlander’s TV photographs in Harper’s Bazaar in 1963 and noted: "The pictures on these pages are in effect deft, witty, spanking little poems of hate...Taken out of context as they are here, that baby might be selling skin rash, the careful, good-looking woman might be categorically unselling marriage and the home and total daintiness. Here, then, from an expert-hand, is a pictorial account of what TV-screen light does to rooms and to the things in them."
Artwork Details
- Title: Philadelphia
- Artist: Lee Friedlander (American, born Aberdeen, Washington, 1934)
- Date: 1961, printed later
- Medium: Gelatin silver print
- Dimensions: Image: 12 1/16 × 17 15/16 in. (30.7 × 45.5 cm)
Sheet: 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm)
Framed: 19 1/2 × 26 in. (49.5 × 66 cm) - Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
- Curatorial Department: Photographs