The Workers

I was recently going through my archive with a mentor and it was highlighted to me that a common theme I had throughout my work is that it often portrayed people in states of flow; deep concentration and focus.

It made me realise that over the years I have shot a lot of what you could term ‘workers’. Being that things currently feel like we are on the cusp of a huge change in the way we work, with AI and automation looming large, it feels like a worthy subject for me to continue to turn my lens too. With that in mind I have put together a new gallery on the website on this very theme; you can find it here.

There’s something that happens to a person when they’re completely absorbed in what they’re doing. The self-consciousness drops away. Whatever they’re making or fixing or tending to becomes the only thing that exists. I have always been drawn to this state – the concentrated labour causes the edifice to fall away. You see who someone actually is.

The philosopher Richard Sennett spent years studying what he called “the craftsman” – his term for anyone, in any field, who is committed to doing a job well for its own sake. He argued that this relationship between hand and mind, between skill and judgment, is one of the things that makes us most fully human. It’s not about the object being made. It’s about the quality of attention being paid.

That quality of attention is exactly what feels at stake right now.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay predicting that by the early twenty-first century, technological progress would have advanced so far that people would only need to work around fifteen hours a week. His concern – stated entirely seriously – was what we would do with all the leisure time. The problem, he thought, would be boredom. Nearly a century on, we’re approaching his deadline and the opposite seems to have happened. And yet the disruption he sensed coming is arriving now, just in a different shape than he imagined.

AI and automation are not going to spare the kinds of work that have traditionally been considered safe – the cognitive, the creative, the professional. The question being asked everywhere at the moment is: what is human labour actually for? What remains when the task can be delegated to a machine?

I don’t think this body of work answers that question, but hopefully it poses the question. When I look back through these images – the concentration in someone’s hands, the particular way a body organises itself around a tool or a material — I find myself thinking about what we stand to lose if we’re not careful. Not the drudgery. Nobody mourns drudgery. But the meaning that skilled, honed attention to craft quietly carries. The dignity of being someone who knows how to do something, and does it with utter focus.