No Way To Make A Living » photography

Sex at the Job Centre

Lynne Pettinger — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:47:21 +0000

You can find all sorts of jobs at Jobcentre Plus, the statutory agency that helps the unemployed back into work: it’s the place to look if you fancy a working as a driver, check-out assistant, nanny or adult model. Yes, that does say adult model. You could also find work as a ‘webcam performer’. “Duties include performing to a web cam for clients or customers fantasies” and require the performer to be nude (http://jobseekers.direct.gov.uk/ search term ‘webcam performer’ accessed 6th July 2010).

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.

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

Barry, K. (1995) The Prostitution of Sexuality. New York: New York University Press.
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.
Chapkis, W. (1997) Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labour Routledge.
Hakim, C. (2010) ‘Erotic Capital’ European Sociological Review doi:10.1093/esr/jcq014 .
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.
McNair, N (2002) Striptease Culture: Sex, Media, and the Democratization of Desire. London: Routledge.
McRobbie, A. (2009) The Aftermath of Feminism Sage.

Women Drivers

Lynne Pettinger — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 15:24:50 +0000

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

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.
Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2006) ‘The new mobilities paradigm’. Environment and Planning A 2006, volume 38, pp 207–226.

The Offices of State

Lynne Pettinger — Wed, 19 May 2010 11:43:59 +0000

In these photos taken by Martin Argles for the Guardian, we see Gordon Brown and his team preparing to leave Downing Street. These photos interest me for what they show about the spaces and experience of work.

Martin Argles/Guardian: Downing St political staff

In the first photograph, there are three members of staff huddled round one phone. Argles tells us they are listening in as Brown speaks to Nick Clegg, leader of the Lib Dems. “Nick, Nick, I can’t hold on any longer. Nick, I’ve got to go to the palace”, Argles reports hearing (Guardian, 13th May 2010: 21). I’m fascinated by that huddle, it speaks of the hunger, urge and delight to be in on the moment that characterises the political aides and correspondents I’ve met. They are seduced by an everyday proximity to power to imagine that nothing else matters as much, and that hearing things second hand is almost worse than not hearing them at all. Look at the woman hovering behind, one ear turned inwards and her own mobile in hand: it matters so much to be there, to be listening in on an event that matters for just this moment.

I like the ordinariness of the rest of the scene: the big metal cupboard with its fire safety certificate, the Downing Street screensaver on the right of the shot, and at the back, the colleague involved in a very different sort of phone call.

Martin Argles/Guardian: The war room in Downing Street

In the second shot, we see a wider perspective, a layered modernity. Chandeliers, wood panelling and a fireplace point to a Victorian refurbishment of the original Downing Street building, although the lights are now electric and the fireplace is surrounded by desks. Confronting this past is the detritus of the modern office: screens, wires and swivel chairs; coffee cups, iphones, and men in ties. The carousel of MDF desks are paper-free, though an enormous briefcase in the centre of the shot has a wadge of documents shoved in it: this is the last day of work, and this room will soon come to be taken for granted by a different sort of political animal.

What does The Working Lives of Londoners collection of photographs tell us about the working lives of Londoners?

Dawn Lyon — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:10:13 +0000

The Working Lives of Londoners is a series of photographs by Harriet Armstrong on display at City Hall (22 March to 7 May 2010) which shows Londoners ‘going about their daily routine in the capital’ (The Guardian). A selection of images was published in The Guardian in March, but more can be seen on Harriet Armstrong’s website. There are some quirky and original images and together they make an interesting contribution to the recognition of work in today’s world, and some of the spaces that people inhabit in their everyday working lives.

A number of the images are portraits, including of people who are in the public realm, such as Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty, and Boris Johnson, Mayor of London (who I happened to see going into City Hall just as I was leaving this afternoon!). In other portraits we can understand work by the context within the image, for instance the policeman standing outside Number 10 Downing Street, or workers posed amongst theatre props. In these types of photograph, the worker and the job are one (for now at least) and the portrait of the person in their working environment carries the idea of what it is they do in their working lives.

Other images show workers engaged in something and these are the ones I especially like. They show us people, places and activities we don’t usually see, such as the clockmakers inside Big Ben, and they show us people and work that we might not usually notice. The stonemasons of Trafalgar Square, a station supervisor on the Piccadilly Line, and the black cab mechanics all caught my attention; and the London Marathon course measurer was certainly work I had previously taken for granted!

: Neon Light Engineer by Harriet Armstrong

The composition of some of the photographs is stimulating for thinking about work sociologically. In one image, a Neon Light engineer, suspended alongside a building, is pictured from below, the sky becoming the backdrop to his working world. He looks alone up there, only tenuously connected to the world as he holds onto the light he is working on, although in another image, someone else appears to be keeping an eye on him from the ground. We can’t see exactly what the light engineer is doing so we don’t get an insight into the activity of work per se but we do get some sense of what his working life is like from seeing him in the sky like that. The stunning picture of the rope access abseiler cleaning the No 1 London Bright Building is equally evocative.

Although the image of statue cleaners is taken peering into a vehicle, what looks like a harness on one of the workers suggests that his work also takes him off the ground. His co-worker, seen snoozing in the background, is taking a moment out, and this draws our attention to the ways in which working routines include pauses, and are shot through with other activities and meanings.

The materiality of work is very present in the photographs too. The cinema projectionist at the Barbican is seen surrounded by and connected to his equipment, as is the fire-fighter, whereas the organ tuner at the Royal Albert Hall must quite literally get inside the object of his labour.

Work is not presented in these photos in the restricted ways we sometimes see it celebrated, mostly of men doing dangerous things, however fascinating images of these worlds are. Bell-ringers – presumably an unpaid commitment – are shown in perfect coordination in a space lit by what looks like early morning sunshine. The hairdresser in a centre for homeless people might be there on a voluntary basis or as an employee. Overall, the collection transcends rigid categories of work, including artisans, gardeners and protestors alongside teachers and engineers. These photographs encourage us to ask questions about the basis on which work is undertaken, and to recognise the enormous range of work that goes on in London.

Overall, this series is a refreshing look at what we do from a young woman photographer. Thank you, Harriet Armstrong.

Bodywork

Dawn Lyon — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:58:56 +0000

‘Christy, Southwest Airlines’ — Brian Finke

I was looking for images of ‘bodywork’ recently for a seminar discussion with students and came across Brian Finke’s collection on Flight Attendants (see: http://www.brianfinke.com/). I was drawn to this photograph because of the circularity of the different forms of labour it reveals. Bodywork as the work of maintaining a body in the right shape for the job (Shilling, 1993) – also a form of ‘aesthetic labour’ (Witz et al, 2003) — is clear, quite literally, in the pre-defined form of the eyebrow. At the same time, bodywork in Wolkowitz’s (2002) elaboration of the term, where one person’s body is the site of another’s person’s labour, is shown in the hands undertaking the shaping of the eyebrow. But this looks like something that’s happening (or staged as happening) between colleagues. So it also suggests a moment at work infused with intimacy, a back-stage time of informal preparation and relationship, before the aircraft interior itself becomes a formal workspace and the performance really begins.

References
Shilling, C. (1993) The Body and Social Theory, London: Sage.
Witz, A, C Warhurst, D Nickson (2003) ‘The labour of aesthetics and the aesthetics of organization’ Organization, 10(1): 33–54.
Wolkowitz, C. (2002) ‘The social relations of body work’, Work, Employment and Society 16(3): 497–510.

Noticing Work Spaces: Sound Without Vision

Lynne Pettinger — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:41:19 +0000

I got lost last weekend, ending up at Tollesbury Marina. I was thinking about Kat Riach’s piece on sound, as I walked around (it’s not that I’m a workaholic, but a deeply inculcated sociological imagination isn’t easily switched off; it’s a governance of the soul).

There was no-one else around, but it was not quiet.

They were so busy in that rusty corrugated iron shed. I could hear radio 1, and creeking, scraping and whining machinery. They were laughing. I think they mended boats; I have no understanding of what that would involve.

We don’t always notice other people’s work spaces; some are public and yet hidden, but sounds call our attention to work activity and give us clues as to what people are doing even when they cannot be seen.

Resources

Dawn Lyon — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:54:33 +0000

Visual Sociology

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

The Right Trousers

Dawn Lyon — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:32:02 +0000

Left leg

Glue and silicon, paint and varnish, grout and wood-filler. Traces on his clothes. The trousers especially tell the story of my friend’s most recent jobs. There was that shower to fix urgently in Hackney one night last week, and the bathroom to sort out after a would-be plumber with too many tools and too few skills had been let loose in Hampstead. At the ongoing job in South London, he’s supposed to be doing the plumbing and not general building work, but it’s hard to keep the boundaries firm once on-site and when the other guy is not so confident. And working on his own place in the meantime means more varnish and paint than usual.

Right leg

The photos show the sides of his trousers, where his hands reach his upper leg. The marks on them are more than evidence of what got spilt or dropped. They indicate gestures of work. And how the right side (yes, he’s right-handed) takes the strain. And how if you’re going to do stuff like this, where you can’t help yourself wiping the residue of the materials that fix and cover and generally hold things together in houses and bathrooms, well you wouldn’t want to have the wrong trousers for the job.

A Fire-Fighter’s Hands

Dawn Lyon — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:13:44 +0000

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.

The Construction of a New Building

Dawn Lyon — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:14:44 +0000

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.

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

[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.