I was walk­ing through New Cross in South East Lon­don recently when I saw these pho­tos of fire-fighters’ hands. They were fixed to the rail­ings out­side the fire sta­tion, as a kind of heroic cel­eb­ra­tion it seemed to me — and with just cause — of the work that fire-fighters do.

But there’s some­thing odd about these images too. Fire-fighters cer­tainly use their hands, but they’re known for their all-round fit­ness, and for their team-work. In these pho­tos, there is a single pair of hands and noth­ing else shown to be work­ing. Aside from the obvi­ous phal­lic read­ing of what’s hap­pen­ing with the hose, the images can be read as redu­cing the body — and work — to the hands. In them, fire-fighters become their hands — a point made in a dif­fer­ent con­text by Janet Zandy in her book Hands: Phys­ical Labor, Class and Cul­tural Work (2004: xiii; see also Sen­nett, 2008: 174).

It turns out that these images were part of a local art pro­ject sponsored by the New Deal for Com­munit­ies regen­er­a­tion pro­gramme in 2005, and under­taken by Art­mon­gers. A series of images of hands ‘in the­at­rical pos­i­tions’ was used to bring beauty to a con­struc­tion site hoard­ing and to human­ise pub­lic space (http://www.artmongers.com/participatory.html). I don’t know the rest of the story, but I’m guess­ing the fire-fighters liked these pic­tures and some­how or other they ended up out­side the fire sta­tion. But it makes me won­der why they would want this rep­res­ent­a­tion of what they do on pub­lic dis­play, and how it is that they see their own work.

Ref­er­ences
1. Zandy, J. (2004) Hands: Phys­ical Labor, Class and Cul­tural Work. New Jer­sey: Rut­gers Uni­ver­sity Press.
2. Sen­nett, R. (2008) The Crafts­man. Lon­don: Penguin.