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Overview
The title of this black and white photograph is an accurate description of the contents - the bland furnishings of an anonymous hotel room, in which the television occupies centre position. Friedlander's photograph is taken from the perspective of an occupant of the room lying in bed. On the screen, a close-up of a child's face is obscured by fuzzy reception, which adds to the slightly unsettling effect of the photograph.
New Documents
In 1967, a new type of photography that broke with humanist documentary and photojournalist conventions was shown at New York's Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition was called New Documents (curator John Szarkowski), and featured photographs by Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, and Gary Winogrand. Their work did not set out to explore the great themes covered in Life magazine or in The Family of Man, the museum's landmark exhibition twelve years earlier. Friedlander and the others were preoccupied with personal concerns rather than public issues. They were more interested in how the world looked when captured on film than in the specific content of photographs.
The age of television
This is not to say that the photographs taken by Friedlander avoided any engagement with their time and culture. They went about this, however, in a new, elliptical way that eschewed the universal humanist subjects usually found in documentary photography. T.V. in Hotel Room - Galax, Virginia, 1962 deliberately assumes a blank façade from which no general meanings can be extracted. There are no people, only the emptiness of a hotel room. Yet Friedlander's photograph belongs strongly to its time, 1962, year of the Cuban missile crisis, and with television having assumed a central place in American culture.