International Visual Sociology Association: http://www.visualsociology.org/

British Sociological Association Visual Sociology Study Group: http://www.visualsociology.org.uk/

Visual Sociology, A Field Guide: http://visualsociology.wordpress.com/

Sociological Images: http://sociologicalimages.blogspot.com/search/label/work

Josh Packard’s take on visual sociology: http://joshpackard.com/research/visual-sociology/

Visual Collections and Photographers

LastStop! is a visual record of the London Routemasters’ final months, including images of workers, workplaces and passengers: http://www.routemasters.co.uk/

Lost Labor is a collection of photos from the US from 1900–1980 of jobs that no longer exist: http://www.lostlabor.com/

Images from the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike: http://www.strike84.co.uk/

Masters of Photography: http://www.masters-of-photography.com/

V&A Exploring Photography: http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/photography/index.php

Issue magazine: http://www.documentography.com/issue/

Rogan MacDonald: http://www.roganmacdonald.co.uk/

Paul Halliday’s London project: http://www.paulhalliday.org/

London Independent Photography: http://www.londonphotography.org.uk/

Maurice Broomfield’s photographs of industrial Britain: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2f60ef04-1b6c-11df-838f-00144feab49a,dwp_uuid=a712eb94-dc2b-11da-890d-0000779e2340.html

Places and Projects

The Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University includes material on worker portraits and working-class literature: http://cwcs.ysu.edu/

Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths, University of London; http://www.gold.ac.uk/cucr/

The online Gallery of the Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan University, contains images and information about projects on work: http://www.workinglives.org/gallery/gallery.cfm

Discussions

The Case for Working with Your Hands: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?_r=1

Other Interesting Stuff

Exhibition: Striking women: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/News/Press/Pages/StrikingWomen.aspx

New occupations in 2020: http://sciencesowhat.direct.gov.uk/future-jobs/future-jobs-what-might-you-be-doing

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.

The View from 5A

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.

The Move 1

The Move 2

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

I recently co-organised an exhibition work : place exploring the experience of work at the University of Essex. We produced a collective artistic intervention to describes the University on ‘What a Day’, the 18th March 2009. We received almost seventy entries into a competition that asked for an artistic representation of the working day. People submitted photographs, poems, videos and sculptures produced alone or with their colleagues. They are funny, revealing and surprising.

image by Idlan Zakaria

So many occupations are represented at a University; its staff have skills as mechanics, researchers, negotiators, managers, chefs, librarians, administrators. work : place explored how these occupations intersect and co-depend. It made visible the complexity of work in a vast organisation by making visible the employees and how they communicate.

criticising compulsory creativity

One reason for this project was to consider scope for creativity in the contemporary workplace. Whilst universities might well be described as part of the ‘creative industries’, by and large the dominance of a romanticised concept of ‘creativity’ as the act of a free individual (see Toynbee, 2000, ch 2 for a critique), renders creativity as something outside of market or employment relations.

Yet management discourses celebrate and push towards creativity as the hallmark of the successful employee, the value added by the reflexive, self-monitoring worker of the 21st Century: see Bilton (2007) or http://www.creativitycentre.com/.

This sort of thing leads Thomas Osborne to describe creativity as a moral imperative: ‘for who could imaginably be against creativity?’ (2003: 508). He describes a doctrinal ‘compulsory creativity’ as something to stand against, for its promotion of compulsory individualism, innovation, self-performativity and the quest for the new.

Orvar Löfgren offers an alternative critique of the unthinking use of creativity as a new means of production as ‘the striking paradox of trying to domesticate the imagination while at the same time trying to preserve its magic aura of unbridled energy’ (Löfgren, 2003: 246). Here the suggestion is that the institutionalisation of creativity risks making it disappear. So, here are Toynbee, Osborne and Löfgren criticising simplistic accounts of the creative soul; they almost convince me that creativity is overrated; just a step away from exploitation.

‘Leaf Cells’, by Mike Fryer

But on the other hand, I’m a hippy and I think people have great capacity to be creative if they feel like this is within the possible for them. And this was borne out by some of my experience on the work : place project. What surprised me was precisely what Toynbee’s critique of creativity as hyper-individualised might have lead me to expect, had I thought it through: that some people felt they could not participate alone. It was not for them, they didn’t have an artistic bone in their bodies. But let them be in a group, let the group not the individual be described as creative, then all sorts of things became possible.

collaborations

We did not suggest that respondents might submit collectively, but 17 were collaborations from those already working together. Some of the productions were a result of the competition being used as an excuse for management to work on ‘team building’, but there are two I’d like to talk about which came from the work groups themselves, as a form of play interrupting the working day.

The first, To Boldly Go came from a team of cleaning staff in one of the university residences. Here, the youngest of the workers is dressed with the accoutrements of her job, and the poem sits alongside, reflecting the engagement of this group of staff with students and the mess that student’s produce.

ready for work

I’m standing here outside the door and offering up a prayer,
That when I walk inside the flat its not messy everywhere.
Have they had a party with food and lots of drink?
Will the washing up be sky high and blocking up the sinks?
Or could there be a budding cook who made a spag bowl for all,
Then dished it out for all his mates and left mine up the wall.
So now I’ll open up the door, I’ll tell you what I find.
Oh the little darlings have been very, very kind…

The second A Crystal Ball Moment is a photograph of a sculpture made by the course records team. Each worker made a model of themselves out of found office supplies, plastic water cups were chairs and the figures were made from blue-tack. Faces and clothes differ, and one of them is glued to the phone. The piece refers to a (creative) problem-solving discussion about procedure.

A Crystal Ball Moment, by Course Records Team

What both of these, and many others, suggested to me is how the possibility for creativity exists because of the existence of the group; it is not embodied in the individual. Toynbee would probably agree with this, but Löfgren would not approve of the project, precisely because it is the work group who in this instance provides the group identity. Osborne, though somewhat curmudgeonly, might see that creativity is far more appealing — “post heroic” and non-romanticised – when it is not seen as an attribute of the individual.

More on work : place in the future. Thanks to the rest of the project team: Karen Bush, Veerle van den Eynden, Gavin Sandercock, Matt Softly, Richard Stock and Dave Suggett.

references

1. Bilton, C. (2007) Management and creativity: from creative industries to creative management. Oxford, Blackwell Pub.
2. Löfgren, O. (2003) ‘The New Economy: A Cultural History’. Global Networks. A Journal of Transnational Affairs, 3: 239–254.
3. Osborne, T. (2003) ‘Against Creativity: a philistine rant’, Economy and Society 32(4): 507–525 .
4. Toynbee, J. (2000) Making popular music: musicians, creativity and institutions. London: Arnold.

The project aimed to explore labour as a social activity and the forms of work involved in a building refurbishment of this kind; and to explore the building as an object/product of labour that is transformed by it so to map visually the material and spatial changes in the building which is being worked upon, the social/physical construction of place.

The project was based on ethnographic work undertaken in collaboration with Peter Hatton (a visual artist and lecturer at the University of Kent) from March to October 2007, the period during which the building was being refurbished. Photography was central to the methodology but was one of a bundle of related techniques, including informal observation on-site, participation in site meetings, and interviews with the project’s builders, architects and engineers.

The work that people do produces a different kind of relationship to space/place. Builders monopolise the physical manipulation of the building – as process and object. They live and breathe it, quite literally, as its dust and paint and debris get under their nails and skin, and into their hair and eyes. In contrast, engineers and architects know the building as a conceptualised space, through drawings and measurements, reports and schedules, and observed it as a ‘landscape of viewing’.

Lived Space

Conceptualised Space

Building projects are characterised by multiple sequential and co-existent work activities which produce a place such as this building anew, and in which some forms of work are literally covered by others. Indeed, it may be that the product of the labour is the finish that conceals it. Or, the mark of quality of labour is that the finish is unmarked.

When building work was started, the building itself ‘was a complete shell’ comments Michael: ‘We were talking about it the other day, how you can see the end product now.’ Another of the builders, Grant, talks about satisfaction with the job, with the end product as he calls it, since ‘you can see what you’ve achieved,’ he says. As someone who’s in wet trades doing plastering and brickwork, this is true for him. However, this is not the case for all. Ground-workers for instance, never see the end product and their own work is concealed even though it underpins the rest of the project, they’re ‘unsung heroes’ according to some of the other builders interviewed.

This makes us ask: what means of representation can we make use of to hold onto the recognition of the labour involved in the production of place? We came up with the idea of projecting the building back onto itself. The images seek to pull apart what has been remade and expose the building in different states thereby implying the labour of its reconstruction. 

Dado Rail

The juxtaposition of the images below shows co-existent and varied perspectives. It brings different moments into the same moment of seeing (now) and offers a way to re-view what might be taken for granted in a single image. In the second set of images, by stretching and superimposing them in specific ways, our attention can be drawn to what we are not necessarily conscious of in a single image, for instance, the movement involved in the labour in the upper body, and the weight and discomfort of the position of the lower body (kneeling on the wood).

Laying Screed 1

Laying Screed 2

A gain of the visual, especially for the sociology of work, is in getting at elements of complexity it is difficult to grasp with other methods, especially in workplaces that are not familiar to us all, restricted spaces, such as building sites.

Whilst there is considerable innovation in data collection and research practices in visual sociology, there remains reluctance to be similarly innovative in ways of telling and representing research (through image, sound and text). Putting things together in novel ways, e.g. collage, allows us to gain different insights — there is therefore analytic potential in working with the visual as data and representation.

To download the leaflet from the exhibition that was one of the outcomes of this project, go to: http://www.kent.ac.uk/sspssr/staff/academic/lyon/rochester.pdf.