“THERE IS NOTHING BETTER THAN A FOND MEMORY”

FRIEDLANDER, Lee. Cray at Chippewa Falls. Photographs by Lee Friedlander. Minneapolis: Cray Research, 1987. Oblong quarto, original russet cloth, mounted cover label. $650.

First and only edition, with 79 full-page black-and-white photographs of workers at Cray’s Wisconsin super-computer assembly plant.

"One of the most influential of contemporary photographers," Lee Friedlander has devoted a good part of his career to chronicling the working lives of Americans, at factories in Ohio and Pennsylvania, in steel mills and telemarketing firms, at MIT in Boston, on Wall Street and here, in a Wisconsin factory making super computers" (McDarrah, 155). "Friedlander's practiced eye sees glimpses of the future read in patterns of the present, as the old human work of making physical objects becomes obsolete" (Richard Benson). This edition was commissioned by the CEO of Cray Research as a celebration of the company's 15th anniversary, and privately printed in an edition of 5000 copies as gifts for its employees. With an afterword by photographer Stuart Klipper, in which he quotes Friedlander's warm pun on his Cray book, "There is nothing better than a fond memory." Issued without a dust jacket.

Fine condition. Scarce.