The ticket seller jokes with me. No need to worry about missing the train, he’s the driver, she says. He says he’ll go just as soon as he can be bothered to walk up to the cab, right at the other end. That’s his job: drive one way, walk back down 8 carriages, get in the other end and drive back. If only, he says, one day they’d set the points wrong and he could go all the way to Clacton.

The photographs in the presentation are extracts from the two works I made. One, “Every Night The Same” reflected the experience of having the same dream, night after night, and the experience of seeing only a part of a place as big as a university: however long I work there, it’s never graspable. I can capture only a glimpse. What I see is repeated, though not replicated elsewhere, in the straight lines of buildings, and blinds, and crushed cardboard. These images were shot on my Canon F1, 50mm lens using Kodak black and white film, 3200iso at ankle height, 13th Feb 2011.

The second work, “Actual Occasions”, used Impossible Project film for a polaroid camera. Polaroid doesn’t make film for its cameras any more, and so Impossible have tried to work out how. They haven’t quite got it right, and so the photos are unstable, full of light leaks and odd shadows. That suits this project admirably, as the properties of the things that are shot are not stable. “Actual Occasions” is taken from Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, which seems to me to argue that events and objects are not fixed and immutable but create moments of time and space, which are then experienced by other actual occasions. These other occasions involve a recurrence of experiences, times and spaces. Objects therefore, have something of a life themselves.

A few other images are present in this slideshow, and they’re interspersed with dreams recorded by staff and students at the university. Even the most nightmarish dream sounds funny written down, and it’s not surprising that many dreams are about work.

Thanks to Michael Halewood for the commission and the curation.

More interesting though are the subtle manifestations of work within the lifeworlds of the people I studied, all British, all playing something loosely describable as ‘Americana’. The project became a photographic one, and in a minute I’ll write a few words about the daftness and delights of exploring the work of a musician using a silent medium. In the meantime, take a look at the clothes worn in the photos below. Style inspiration from Tom Joad: checked shirts aplenty, bought from Top Man or Urban Outfitters in imitation of a homespun Americana, this ‘plaid’ workwear was previously worn by a class of white agricultural workers who’ve since disappeared. The echoes are still seen and heard in the backrooms of pubs and on the small stages of provincial theatres, and have been for some years. Nowadays such check shirts, with their connotations of hard, masculine, manual labour can be seen on the backs of all sorts of folk, not just the musicians. But the Americana revival in Britain has played a role in this fashion, and is tied in with a notional claim to authenticity whereby the aesthetics of clothing suit the aesthetics of the sound.

But you can’t see the sound. Plaid shirts are one of the clues as to what you might imagine the sound is, assuming you have any sense of what Americana might sound like (and if not, there are plenty of recommendations on http://www.americana-uk.com).

(Click on image to see full photograph with analytic notes).

I started taking the photos in order to see differently the forms of work that made up performance: unloading, setting up, sound checking, and the transformation of the body needed to go from hefting amps to winning the attention of an audience. The first shots were in colour, the second and subsequent ones in black and white. Black and white seemed more fitting, given how in using photography (not video, not sound recording) I’d already removed enormous amounts of sense-data anyway. Reduction is the aim of most social research – take the complexity of the social world and make it manageable. Removing colour, movement and sound leaves the focus on the bodies at work, how they move, how they are held. So I built four sets of images of performances, all to focus attention on the body as it works on stage.

“Silence and immobility underpin the authority of the photography” suggests Lury (1998: 173). But I think she’s wrong. It’s impossible not to notice the silence here, and this is destabilising as it makes clear the utter partiality of what a photograph can ever claim to represent. Like all forms of social research, using photography as a way of gathering data and analysing the world produces only a small story of a sort of truth. Any reminder of the partiality of any representation is an important and useful form of humility. Noticing what is missing matters as much as remarking on what is there. And thinking about what might be there in addition to what can be seen is more than a parlour game, it is an act of imagination.

Reference

Lury, C. (1998) Prosthetic Culture: Photography, memory and identity. London: Routledge.

one

two

three

four

five

six

seven

eight

nine

The pampas grass is blooming [ten], echo of some earlier moment of landscaping to soften the concrete and corrugated iron structure, and the bushes by the main entrance are pricklingly out of control [eleven]. The letter box is still there, and still working [twelve]; who knows whether the cctv is still hooked up to some distant watching eyes [thirteen].

ten

eleven

twelve

thirteen

Work was done to close the building. Chipboard has been nailed in where glass once was, different boards at different points. Smooth here, the front of the building [fourteen], but scruffy, upside down mdf here at the back [fifteen].

fourteen

fifteen

Here’s a makeshift skate ramp [sixteen]; the carpark’s now a place for playing. Who knows what happens out here [seventeen], or why there’s a rusty wheel suspended from chipboard [eighteen]. A few of the paving slabs at the front entrance have been dug out; then piled up and left [nineteen]. Work undoes the Works.

sixteen

seventeen

eighteen

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Bologna portico

The 2010 International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA) Conference was held at the world’s oldest university, Università di Bologna, in Italy. Bologna la Rossa (named for its red roofs and historically leftist politics) is an utterly beautiful city, with porticos along the streets enabling walkers to wander sheltered from the sunshine. This annual conference is a place for those working in sociology and related disciplines to share and develop their experience and knowledge of working with the visual, and this year the focus was reflected in the conference title: Thinking, Doing and Publishing Visual Research: The State of the Field? This provided an opportunity to reflect on different methodological practices based on photography, video and similar tools. (You’ve certainly never seen so many conference delegates with cameras.)

Valentina Cuzzocrea (University of Cagliari) suggested that she and nowaytomakealiving collaborate to run a panel on work and the visual. At the 2009 conference, Carol Wolkowitz and Phil Mizen (both University of Warwick) had organised two sessions on the theme of ‘Topographies of Work’ which generated interesting discussion of the ways in which work spaces produce particular experiences and representations of work. Our call for papers this year also generated sufficient interest to put on two sessions, the first with a focus on ‘doing work’, the second on work in cultural industries. Given that the dominant topics of the conference were consumption, the city and digital technologies, these panels on work were (inevitably) outliers. If the study of work has lost its foothold in sociology, it is even further from the imaginations of those in cultural studies, media and communications. However, we argue – and demonstrate — that this general absence is not justified (especially in the current economic climate), and that visual sociology has a lot to offer the study of work.

Paolo Cardullo (Goldsmiths College, UK) began by presenting his photography of workers along the Thames at Greenwich. Contrasting the top down vision of residents in the new build flats, Paolo spoke to the all male and predominantly migrant workforce working close up to the river, in the boundary zone of the post-industrial dockside. His photographs of welders seemed to show the man consumed by the job. He described the precarity of work and life for these workers. There’s a small irony in a precarious working life spent addressing the precarity of the material world: fixing the boats, cleaning the rust, welding the gaps. You can view his photobook, Doing Work: Chronicles of the Working River here.

Dawn Lyon (University of Kent, UK) spoke about her ethnography of the refurbishment of a building in Medway, Kent in which she and artist-collaborator, Peter Hatton (also University of Kent), experimented with different ways of documenting and representing the practice of work. Peter fixed his gaze on change over time as seen from specific spaces across the building site, whilst Dawn followed with the camera whatever work was going on at the time of the visit. Through these approaches, it was possible to appreciate differences in workers’ relationships to the building (conceptual, material, embodied), and document how successive layers of the refurbishment served to conceal earlier labour. (Read more here.)

Phil Mizen (University of Warwick, UK), presenting a paper co-authored by Yaw Ofosu-Kusi (University of Education, Winneba, Ghana) decried the vogue for researchers putting cameras in the hands of children as though presuming a self-evident relationship between the images and the reality of children’s lives produced by a ‘pure’ gaze. When reading the images generated by street children in Accra, Ghana he shows how complex is the relationship between seeing and knowing. The substantive aim of the paper was to explore the complexities of informal economic activity by children. Plastic bag selling was often an entry point into the informal economy, with children then moving into potentially more stable forms of work, often patron relationships with street sellers or bus drivers. Phil argued that ideas about skill were not relevant, but the children drew on ingenuity and creativity to make a living.

In the second panel, the focus shifted to work in the culture industries. Terry Austrin (University of Canterbury, New Zealand) presented a paper co-authored with John Farnsworth (CPIT, New Zealand) on The September Issue, a cinéma vérité documentary on the production of American Vogue and a portrait of its editor, Anna Wintour. Terry argued that the film invoked a reconfiguration of culture work as distributed worlds are made and remade across media platforms – as when the documentary cameraman is photographed for the September issue. Terry also drew on Latour to explore how objects coordinate the embodied, affective work of magazine journalism, paying attention to the low-tech whiteboard where the magazine is laid out.

Lynne Pettinger (University of Essex) took a different approach to the role of the object in work, exploring the creative production of performance. She argued that concepts familiar to the sociology of work (aesthetic labour, emotional labour and craft) are productive in making sense of creative work, and used these to read photographs of performing musicians. The photographs reveal the interrelationships between bodies and technologies needed for performance, and the way the working body is transformed. She finished by reflecting on the gains of silence and immobility when exploring multi-sensory experiences.

The perfect macchiato

Viktorya Aleksanayan (Slavic University, Armenia) finished the session with an autobiographical tale of starting work in media production in Armenia. She described the need to develop a wide range of skills when working in small businesses, and of how quickly she had learned how to put together a TV show. There followed a lively discussion of the merits of photography when film and video were so readily available, and we thank our presenters and audience for being part of the conversation. We then finished the afternoon admiring the skill of the local barista and his creation of the perfect macchiato…

You need these…	and these…
and these…	and these…
and these…	and these…
and these…

And once those neat piles on the ground have been rendered vertical, you need gear…

to climb…

But take your time.

It seems commercial sex in a striptease culture (McNair, 2002) is mainstream. The liberalisation of sexual behaviour reflects a particular conceptualisation of modern subjectivity as individualised and commodified (Livingston, 1998). This perspective acts as a powerful moral pull in favour of the normalisation of the right to a range of sexual behaviours that might formerly have lain in the domain of the abject. This liberalisation, even a compulsion to speak of sex, retains a hint edge of moral taint, though. In the case of commercial sex, from the everyday erotic labour of bar staff (Boyle, 2007) to market exchange of sexual intercourse, there is a tension between tolerance and taint. On one hand is a powerful drive towards tolerating or accepting sexual practices where those who engage are seen as making legitimate choices as agents in modern society. On the other are arguments that such practices are invariably degrading and inappropriate, either because sex – like other intimacies – ought not be marketised, or because those selling sex cannot make a ‘free’ choice to self-exploit (Barry, 1995). And even those who feel empowered by a (postfeminist) right to speak and act as a sexual subject are, for McRobbie, being interpellated into a dominated subject position (McRobbie, 2009).

What sort of work is this webcam performing? Well, such Live Sex Acts (Chapkis, 1997) might be ways in which workers can maximise the returns from what Hakim calls ‘erotic capital’ (2010): sex appeal, charm, social skills and all-round phwoarness. Prostitution, classically understood is not advertised by JobCentre plus. It is morally outside the pale as it involves the transgression of corporeal boundaries. The webcam performer, however, though their corporeality is central, seems to escape this outsiderdom. They and the customer (the webcam wanker) are engaged in a cyborg reality of sex work. Sight and sound are the senses that matter, not touch and smell and taste. The body is seen and heard; consumed like a tv programme, not consumed like a cake.

© Cammie Touloui, from Lusty Ladies series

The ad says that the job involves “explicit sexual dialogue which may cause embarrassment to some people”. This interests me: the nudity is present in a matter of fact way, it’s the talk that is problematic and may provoke an emotional response. In the exhibition at Tate Modern Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera there are several photographs that explore dimensions of the sex industry. Susan Meiselas’s pictures of strippers and Cammie Toloui’s remind us that there is nothing passive, nothing safe, nothing disembodied about ‘just looking’.

References

1. Barry, K. (1995) The Prostitution of Sexuality. New York: New York University Press.
2. Boyle, K. (2007) ‘The mobilisation of sexuality: an ethnography of the sexualised labour process in the style bar industry.’ Paper presented to the 25th International Labour Process Conference.
3. Chapkis, W. (1997) Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labour Routledge.
4. Hakim, C. (2010) ‘Erotic Capital’ European Sociological Review doi:10.1093/esr/jcq014 .
5. Livingston, J. (1998) Modern subjectivity and consumer culture, in Strasser, S., McGovern, C. & Judt, M. Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the 20th Century: 413–430. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6. McNair, N (2002) Striptease Culture: Sex, Media, and the Democratization of Desire. London: Routledge.
7. McRobbie, A. (2009) The Aftermath of Feminism Sage.
   ]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/1027/feed 0 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/1001 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/1001#comments Fri, 18 Jun 2010 15:24:50 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=1001 One of my favourite flickr groups is ‘Taxis of the world from inside’. I like the glimpses of the city in these shots, and the confusion between the outside spaces and the mobile indoors of the car. The car in the city represents a supermodernity (Augé, 2009), a non-place, neither public, nor private, fluid without being free. Taxi drivers are sometimes mythologised as an emblem of the city “The New York City cabdriver personifies the energy and zeal of the world’s greatest city” (Hodges, 2007: 1), or as an opportunity for the privileged to access an ‘authentic’ ‘cab spun wisdom’, with all the class overtones that carries; although recent events in the UK point to the danger of the loner-driver (I’m thinking here of Jon Worboys, the ‘black cab rapist’ and Derrick Bird who recently shot dead 12 people and injured 11 in Cumbria).

   The set of photos by Suzanne Lee/Panos London, of women taxi drivers in Delhi gives lie to the hypertheorising of supermodernity. Here, an older story of gender, family and work is on display. Diya Chaudhri’s text describes women’s discovery of freedom and subject status through their entry into taxi driving. For Meenu Vadera, director of the Azad Foundation which trains women to become taxi drivers, this is a way of giving women citizenship: the driving license is a document which proves existence.

   

   Photo by Suzanne Lee for Panos London

   One of the women interviewed, Ekta , says “I feel empowered, as if I have my own identity other than a wife and mother.” There is extensive research to show how paid work provides empowerment and connection and freedom, but taxi driving differs from other work. For Sheller and Urry (2006), mobility is a way of gaining subjectivity, of becoming a person; though they don’t give that much of a sense of whether it matters what the mobility is for, is it just to be prized for its own sake?

   It seems here that it is work as much as mobility, that offers this subject status, and mobilities research should take work seriously. The female taxi driver challenges the norms of the city as a gendered space because she works and well as because she moves. Running a taxi, of course, is not merely a process of learning how to negotiate those city streets with that machine, but of negotiating the internal space of the car. Chaudhri notes the challenge the women taxi drivers provide to other drivers on Delhi’s streets, but the only customers she considers are other women, who will feel safer if driven by a woman. I wonder and worry about the dangerous customers. However empowering it is to learn to drive, being at the vanguard of gender equality and working as a driver is a risky place.

   References

   1. Augé, M. (2009) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso.
      Hodges, G. R G. (2007) Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
   2. Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2006) ‘The new mobilities paradigm’. Environment and Planning A 2006, volume 38, pp 207–226.
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