The book The Little Screens, published by Fraenkel Gallery to accompany the 2001 exhibition, opens with a text by Walker Evans, who wrote of these photographs in a 1963 issue of Harper’s Bazaar: “deft, witty, spanking little poems of hate“.
The images, taken in the 1960s, are black and white photographs of television screens in anonymous motel rooms across the United States. Each screen is captured in the act of broadcasting vivid images of pop icons, political figures or minor celebrities of the time.
The Little Screens not only documents the squalor of the furnishings typical of those years, but also an increasingly intrusive reality: the omnipresence of television screens and the hum of voices in the background, filling the void created by an increasingly isolationist culture.
