No Way To Make A Living is a sociological space about work, generating discussion and exchange on what work, paid or unpaid, is like in today’s world

In Decem­ber 2005, just a few months into a two-year research con­tract at Essex, the bull-dozers arrived and star­ted dig­ging dir­ectly out­side my office. Con­struc­tion of the new Social Sci­ence Research Build­ing was finally under­way. A good thing for sure, in prin­ciple but not in such close prox­im­ity. Still, I took to look­ing out of the win­dow for long peri­ods — it was an excel­lent vant­age point since my office was on the fifth floor — and I learnt a lot about pile-driving and lay­ing found­a­tions, and enjoyed won­der­ing from a dis­tance about who did what and how everything was organ­ised and nego­ti­ated.[1]

I star­ted tak­ing pho­tos without much of a pro­ject in mind at first but soon thought it would be inter­est­ing to keep a record of the whole period of the con­struc­tion. I con­vinced Colin Sam­son of the idea and we got into a routine, tak­ing pic­tures almost every week until Easter, always from the office win­dow and some­times through the blind. By that point, the struc­ture was start­ing to emerge. Then we both went on hol­i­day and missed the second floor go on. After that I car­ried on (Colin had become bored!), tak­ing pic­tures every couple of weeks or so until I left the Uni­ver­sity in Septem­ber 2006. This was before the out­side was fin­ished, but for­tu­nately, Lucinda’s Platt’s office was dir­ectly above mine at the time and some of the final pho­tos were taken from there by her or by me, the last in Feb­ru­ary 2007.

I wanted to do some­thing with this but wasn’t sure what. Then when I saw David Hockney’s photo-collages in his exhib­i­tion of por­traits at the National Por­trait Gal­lery in Autumn 2006, I knew I wanted to make a pic­ture story like them. I love the sim­ul­tan­eity of time and place, for instance, in the moods of com­pet­i­tion of The Scrabble Game, and in the ges­tures of Billy Wilder light­ing his cigar.[2]

With some help think­ing it all through from Rowena Macaulay, I star­ted put­ting the pic­tures together, select­ing, cut­ting, stick­ing and fid­dling about with them. In the end, I made a single large col­lage com­posed of sev­eral lines of images rep­res­ent­ing the form­a­tion of the build­ing and how it took shape over the time of its con­struc­tion. The bot­tom line shows the ground being moved, the next one up is of the lay­ing of the found­a­tions, and above that, the floors gradu­ally appear. As the space gets enclosed, fewer of the build­ing work­ers are vis­ible in the pho­tos. The build­ing emerges as the product of their work, and at the same time con­ceals the work which made it.

The ori­ginal col­lage can now be seen on the ground floor of the Social Sci­ence Build­ing at the Uni­ver­sity of Essex. The pic­ture of it here in situ has some reflec­tions of the room and the build­ing itself back into it – this wasn’t inten­tional but I like the sense it cre­ates of the col­lage as part of the building.

To fin­ish off the pro­ject, I decided (with per­mis­sion from the UK Data Archive) to pho­to­graph the move of the Data Archive into the new build­ing. I spent two days with the removal men, fol­low­ing them around and pho­to­graph­ing their trips back and forth across the cam­pus. In the end, they got me to help out. From this I made a series of col­lages show­ing the labour of removal, two of which are pos­ted here.

 

---

[1] It was dur­ing this time that I star­ted to form ques­tions that I explored fur­ther in my next build­ing work pro­ject – see the post, ‘See­ing work: Time, space and labour on a build­ing site’, under Pro­jects on this site.

[2] These images can be found online or in vari­ous of Hockey’s publications.