“WE ARE SURE OF WHAT WE DO BUT ARE NEVER SURE OF WHAT IT IS WE ARE DOING”

FRIEDLANDER, Lee. Cray at Chippewa Falls. Photographs by Lee Friedlander. Minneapolis: Cray Research, 1987. Oblong quarto, original rust cloth, mounted cover label. $1400.

First and only edition printed, signed by Lee Friedlander, with 79 full-page black-and-white photographs of workers at Wisconsin’s Cray Research.

"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 & McDarrah, 155). "In Cray at Chippewa Falls, Friedlander is so close to his best that this has become one of the most covetable and instructive of company photobooks" (Parr & Badger II:199). This edition commissioned by the CEO of Cray Research to celebrate the company's 15th anniversary, with 5000 copies privately printed as a gift for its employees. With afterword by photographer Stuart Klipper. Issued without dust jacket. Copies are scarce and signed copies highly desirable.

Very slightest rubbing to covers. About-fine.