‘Galax Va’ is one of Lee Friedlander's signature images from the Little Screens series. Replete with witty, ironic, and perceptive photographs that capture the growing ubiquity of television in post-war America, the series offers deadpan comedic commentary on the vacuity of popular culture. Taken between 1961 and 1970, in locales ranging from Florida to Washington State, each photograph includes within its frame a television set, which eerily illuminates an empty room and provides a window into the flickering moments of entertainment, advertising, or politics consumed by mid-century American viewers.

Images from Friedlander’s series were first published, along with text by his friend and mentor Walker Evans, in the February 1963 issue of Harper’s Bazaar. The feature was titled ‘The Little Screens: A Photographic Essay by Lee Friedlander with a Comment by Walker Evans.’ Evans introduced the article with this statement:

The series’ unlikely debut in Harper’s Bazaar directly resulted from art director Marvin Israel’s effort in the early 1960s to replace traditional magazine imagery with edgier work by Friedlander, Robert Frank (see Lot 4), Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, and Andy Warhol, among others. A photographer of the American social landscape, Friedlander is known for his detached images of the urban and the everyday. He was influenced by the work of Frank and Evans, who likewise photographed America in all its complexity. Like Frank, Friedlander's camera of choice was the handheld 35mm Leica.

Curators, critics, and the general public alike acknowledged the importance of The Little Screens at the outset of its first publication in Harper’s Bazaar. John Szarkowski included one photograph from the series in his encyclopedic 1964 exhibition, The Photographer’s Eye, at The Museum of Modern Art. Szarkowski also included the work in the seminal 1967 exhibition New Documents. Early recognition by one of the foremost photography curators at this time reinforced the ingenuity of this body of work. Viewers today can appreciate Friedlander’s prescient choice to capture the omnipresence of screens in American culture at a time when televisions were just beginning to permeate the living rooms of every home in the country.