The Hidden World of the London Underground Night Shift Worker

Found this great website about night workers on the London Underground:
http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/L-oY6KeqzmT/Hidden+World+London+Underground+Night+Shift/GOTEeHxLthr
which shows wonderfully atmospheric images of night workers and explains the work they do.

Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky best known for his massive architectural and perspective photographs. He uses extremely wide, panoramic-like angles to create an overwhelming sense of presence and space. His subjects bear some sort of repetition.  He also photographed workers at their workplace, treating them in the same way.

 

  

The composition of Gursky’s images are nothing like mine – they show people working at their workplace – mine are the opposite – portraits of workers in their workplace, but not working.  Gursky’s photographs are packed with detail.

The second picture is of the assembly room at Siemens in Karlsruhe.  The wheeled trolleys are individually numbered and the racks carry all sort of labelled materials. You could, if you were sufficiently interested, piece together the processes from the evidence available, as you could in many of Gursky’s large-scale pictures of manufacturing.  But would you really care to implicate yourself in al that complexity, even if it does involve other people’s lives?  Gursky’s subject is not so much the world out there as an autonomous system in itself, as our reading of this world.  His suggestion is not that working life is deplorable and that we must sympathize with its participants, but that we are in no position to come to any conclusions whatever, that we lack analytical capacity even when the evidence is as thick on the ground as it is here.  (The Photography Book, 1997:188)

Stuart Franklin - The Potato Farmer

 

Stuart Franklin photographed a peasant farmer carrying a sack of potatoes along a track in the Peruvian Andes in 1991.  Potatoes are a traditional crop in the area, hand cultivated on ancestral terraces, the man himself is a speaker of Quechua, the language of the Inca.  For the moment, though, he is struggling under a heavy load and seems to be more labourer than representative of an ancient culture.  Franklin’s strategy has been to re-introduce evidence of materiality into his pictures and to show more than just surfaces.  (The Photography Book, 1997:156)

W Eugene Smith

W Eugene Smith took pictures of workers.

In 1948, he photographed Dr Ernest Ceriani in Colarado.

 
Smith’s photographs of working-class Britain were published, including three shots of the South Wales valleys. In a documentary made by BBC Wales, Professor Dai Smith traced a miner who described how he and two colleagues had met Smith on their way home from work at the pit and had been instructed on how to pose for one of the photos published in Life magazine.  (http://www.masters-of-photography.com/S/smith/smith_articles1.html)

Sabastiao Salgado - Workers

Sabastião Salgado had the utmost respect for the workers he photographed around the world between 1986 and 1991 for his book ‘Workers, An Archaeology’ (1993), which paid homage to the manual labour that was slowly disappearing. La Grange (2005:240) states that he could be regarded as one of the most prominent contemporary humanist photographers.

 

Milton Rogovin - Appalachian Miners

Milton Rogovin documented the difficult economic and working conditions of the Appalachian mining communities at work and at home between 1962 and 1971, returning in the 1980s to continue photographing them with the desire to help the communities he documented.

“His work speaks of the humanity of working people, the poor and the forgotten ones.” (http://www.miltonrogovin.com/home.php)

He photographed miners at work and at home, showing the ‘normal’, human side to these people.  We see them as ‘workers’, but we also see them as ‘people’.

Here we have simple portraits of people, which is what I am doing, so these images fit in both with image style and content.

Margaret Bourke-White - Tenant Farmers

Margaret Bourke-White documented the impoverished lives of tenant farmers in the Depression with writer Erskine Caldwell in their book ‘You Have Seen Their Faces’ (1937), one of the first books to show this kind of imagery in America.

Like Hine, Bourke-White’s images were used as evidence to inform the public of the harsh lives of tenant farmers in the 1930s.

The farmers are shown at work and this photograph also gives the subject dignity and iconifies her too.

This photograph, as with Hine, is trying to urgently communicate to us.

Lewis Hine - Child Labour

Lewis Hine viewed his camera as ‘a powerful tool for research’ and photographed child workers in an attempt to instigate legislation against child labour.

The children are shown at work, usually with the equipment they operate in the background.

His photographs were mainly records of the terrible conditions in the mills and used as evidence.

He saw the camera as a means to ‘vivify’ empirical, scientific facts; to flesh them out, to prove them. The camera, for Hine, was fundamentally a source of truth. The photograph was an unmediated reflection of the world ‘outside’, a true record of the subject stood before it. (Tagg, 1988:195)

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is no major issue with my work.  I am not trying to change laws, but my photographs are a kind of evidence that the night workers I photograph exist.  As they do ‘hidden’ jobs, jobs many people take for granted, I am revealing them in the hope that people who do these kinds of jobs are recognised and appreciated.

 

The style of these photographs is not dissimilar to how I'm photographing my workers - simple portraits.