Working Conditions at The Ringling Museum

Working Conditions, recently at the Ringling Museum of Art, consisted of photographs that depict how work has changed over the past two centuries. Black-and-white images of gold and coal miners from the earliest days of photography begin a narrative that culminates with drab cubicles and colorful images from the tech industry. We see the workers’ tasks change with technological advancements, but their dazed, exploited faces take precedence despite their era. 

Stanton B. and Nancy W. Kaplan Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Ringling Museum, Chris Jones, assembled the exhibition from the museum’s permanent collection. “One of the things I’d like us to consider with this exhibition is, ‘How do we communicate the idea of work and labor?’ Because, often, in photography, the traditional format is one frame; one frozen moment. But even if you photograph somebody with a hard labor job you don’t get very much information from that image. Looking around the room, what sort of visual language or cues do photographers give us to communicate the idea of labor? With some people you see the sweat and the grime, but that’s juxtaposed with images from their moments of rest where we can imagine how hard they're working. ‘How do we portray hard work?’ We either feel it or see the signifiers of it.” 

The exhibition begins with a photograph by Eguène Atget that depicts a lady of the night and a patron in front of a brothel. He isn't a top-hat wearing socialite like is depicted by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec or the movie Moulin Rouge. Rather, he wears a military uniform. They both address the viewer by looking straight at the camera, and neither seems self-effacing about their early-morning activities. “This is a gift of Stan Kaplan,” says Jones. “He was a huge Atget fan, and collected a lot of his work, and donated sixty-nine Atgets to our collection. But he always liked to find Atget images with people in them because he wanted to go against the grain of what we think of classic Atget. So, a lot our photographs from Atget have like someone in front of a store or a ghost image reflection of them in a window. French painter André Dignimont commissioned Atget to document sex workers in 1921 as part of a never-realized publication project, which resulted in Atget only making ten or twelve of these portraits. This image is a very candid document of a person in a role, and perhaps her client, we assume, but there’s no judgment in it.”

We then walk to a portrait by Walker Evans. “This is one of his first portraits using a large format camera. In the 1930s, he was commissioned to take photographs in Cuba, and he made several portraits of men who shovel coal,” says Jones. The photograph depicts an old man whose body and clothes are uniformly covered in soot. The toxicity of the coal mines are palpable in the photograph, complete with Evans’s signature vast range of monochromatic values. “It’s hard to fathom how old he is,” says Jones. “Despite being so old, he’s still engaged in this hard labor. It’s in that Evans spirit of the democracy of photography in that even the most menial of workers warrant representation.”

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a large color lightbox by Lewis Baltz that depicts the secured clean space of a high-tech Kawasaki factory. The workers wear white head-to-toe jumpsuits with masks and goggles in order to assure they don’t contaminate the highly sensitive instruments and devices they make there. “It’s about labor in the post-industrial age,” says Jones. In her book, The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Charlotte Cotton makes a connection between the advent of high-tech clean rooms and Baltz’s transition to color photography. “This shift was necessary for Baltz to focus attention on the spectacle of ‘clean’ industries, and the codification and zones of data carried by these pristine spaces.”[1] 

One of the most striking photographs in the exhibition shows a dug-out landscape with prospectors mining for gold. With a wide-angle view, the miners appear tiny compared to the near-vertically inclined landscape that’s been dug out to the point where it’s clearly a hazardous work environment. Arguably the most striking aspect of this photograph is the fact that it’s not from the American West of the 1800’s. Rather, it’s from Brazil in the 1980s. “Brazil had a gold rush in the early 1980s,” says Jones. “There was a complicated allotment system where people bought little plots that went down in to the ground, so they were cutting away in to the earth. You had this narrow section that was yours, and people would be sent down to, by hand, pull up dirt and material that would be sifted. And the laborers would be assigned a small section to sift for themselves and keep any gold they found. According to reports, it was just constant violence and mortality. They were desperate people working in desperate positions.”

One of the most influential photographers on the topic of labor is Lewis Hine. His signature photograph is of a man with an enormous wrench turning a bolt. The Hine photograph in Working Conditions is of young children working as coal breakers in the mines of Pennsylvania. Their faces are stoic as they address the camera, and their bodies are covered in soot to the point that they blend in to their hazardous surroundings. “Lewis Hine was defined by his child labor work early in his career,” says Jones. “These coal breakers are young boys whose job it was to sort the coal as it came through the chutes. The coal is actually coming underneath them, so they’re sitting on these planks and reaching down to sort the coal. And the machines would keep running no matter what, and the kids would frequently get injured.”

Margaret Bourke-White is one of the most important commercial photographers in the history of American photography. As a staff photographer for LIFE Magazine in the 1930s, Bourke-White was a trailblazer in the workforce. “This image shows women working in one of the first rayon factories,” says Jones. “She was a champion of American industrialism, and, in her images, workers are shown fitting seamlessly within production. She was inspired by modernism and art deco design, and she frequently highlighted women workers.”

Possibly the most relatable photographs in the exhibition are a series called Working (I Do It for the Money) (1975 - 1977) by Bill Owens that depict the insufferable, cubicle-laden interiors of office buildings and the workers who work in them. They’re black-and-white, shot in that deadpan style so emblematic of contemporary photography, and are arranged in a large array that covers the entire wall. “Remember that movie Office Space?” asks Jones. “There’s a little bit of tongue-in-cheek humor in this series. But Owens was committed to visit all of these places: blue collar workers and white collar workers. All of the visual culture and material culture of the 1970s are present in these. After being a photographer, Owens became an entrepreneur and founded one of the first microbreweries in California.” 

The most recent work in the exhibition is a portrait by Endia Beal, from her series titled, Am I What You’re Looking For? (2015 - 2016), which consists of young women of color beginning their careers in the corporate world. The series is photographed against a wall-sized printout of a corridor from an IT office with the edges and borders of the print showing in order to signal that it’s not the actual space where the sitter is being photographed. “She’s interviewing and photographing women in their homes,” says Jones. “It’s against this backdrop of the IT department where Beal worked while she was at Yale MFA and was the only person of color there. This series is about how these office environments are ostensibly neutral, but, of course, they’re not neutral. Instead, these spaces oftentimes normalize white culture and marginalize women of color. She interviews these women and discusses their experiences navigating the workplace.”

Throughout photography's history, we’ve been trying to depict our collective experience. Working Conditions depicts our fundamental commonality: work. With images showing us where we’ve been, what’s unfortunate is that we don’t seem to have come very far. Workers are still exploited, those in power seem to be reaping most of the benefits from labor, and the laws surrounding labor haven’t yet created sufficiently healthy working environments. Perhaps Working Conditions can inspire the bosses of the future to be more respectful of their workers. 

[1] Charlotte Cotton, The Photograph as Contemporary Art (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2020), 85.