Photography and the Worker

Photography and the WorkerBA (hons) Photography, Extended EssayAnnabel Owens

Contents

2

List of Illustrations

3

Introduction

4

Chapter OnePhotography and the Worker During The 1930s

6

Chapter TwoA Comparison Between Images of The Great Depression and The Recession

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Conclusion

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Illustrations

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References

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Bibliography

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List of Illustrations

Fig 1. Spender, Humphrey, Worktown People, circa 1937 p.17Fig 2. Hein, Lewis, Glimpse of the Outer World, 1908 p.17Fig 3. Spender, Humphrey, Worktown People, circa 1937 p.18Fig 4. Spender, Humphrey, Worktown People, circa 1937 p.19Fig 5. Reid, George Davison, Covent Garden Underground Station from Long Acre, circa 1920 p.20Fig 6. Killip, Chris, Seacoal Beach,, 1982 p. 21 Fig 7. Channel 4 Benefits Street, 2014 p.21Fig 8. Beniksen, Jonas, A girl walks along a water pipe in the Industrial Area of Dharavi, 2006 p. 22Fig 9. Bendiksen, Jonas, Untitled, 2013 p.22Fig 10. Spender, Humphrey, Girl with Bobbin, 1937 p.23

Introduction

This extended essay will first discuss the historical context around photography and the worker and secondly the contemporary context of photography and the worker. This essay focuses on the working conditions during The Great Depression of the 1930s and the consequences of The Recession of the 1980s. Prior to The Great Depression, America had a rapid growth in production; but with many American citizens buying the consumables on credit and not being able to pay the banks back, European economies were shorn up during the twenties on the basis of American loans (Edwards, 1984 p.14). The market quickly dried up which lead to The Crash of Wall Street and consequently The Great Depression. This essay also looks into missionary, Tom Harrisons photo collective and observation, Mass Observation. Due to the western economic world being affected by The Crash of Wall Street; Harrison was curious about the worse affected areas of England which was the north. Harrison saw vivid characteristics between northern England with those of the tribes he had observed on his mission to the New Hebrides. Other historical areas of interest discussed in this essay are the hardships the northern working class had to endure; both inside and outside of the working environment these struggles were due to closures of the mines and the mass redundancies which followed. Photographers Humphrey Spender and Chris Killip photographed the knock on effect of these historical events. Another area of interest also discussed within the text is photographer Lewis Hein who photographed in the factories prior to The Great Depression. However many of the Worker Photographer Movement, who was creating guerrilla conflicting propaganda images of the working conditions inside the workplace were put onto black lists; Once fired would not be able to get work in any other factory (Lowndes et al, 1979 p.79). This became yet another struggle not only for the north of England but other western economies of the 1930s. This essay also focuses on the contemporary worker and the photograph and compares it with the historical contexts which will be discussed at the beginning. Similarly to Tom Harrisons Mass Observation, Multistory and Magnum Photos created their own worker photo observation in 2013 to document British industries the focus on Britains industrial skills reminded national and international audiences of our history of innovation from Brunel to Berners-Lee (Multistory, 2012). Following on from the working conditions in the factories in the 1930s, this essay discusses the harsh working conditions in an Amazon warehouse that is currently operating in England.

Chapter One: Photography and The Worker During The 1930sOne can see stark similarities between The Great Depression of the 1930s and The Recession of 2008, author Stephen Edwards writes about the effects of The Great Depression and how it affected the northern working class and how the struggles were portrayed through photographs It is only by conceiving of these products as historical objects, only by situating them within the complex network of ideologies active in the period, that their differences can be comprehended (Edwards, 1984 p.13). Edwards illuminates the new industries that were rising in the south and the industries that were rapidly declining in the north. Fig.1, an image from Mass Observation shows the slum like housing, with rows of houses that are crammed together and the dirty streets almost look like a slightly more advanced shanty town in a less economically developed country. The rapid decline in the north had devastating effects on the northern economy and its communities; the vast majority of the coal mines were closed down, leaving thousands of workers unemployed which raised the poverty levels in Britain, consequently leading to the drop in health which became a problem during the break out of The Second World War as many men were declined from the army due to poor health. He also takes about how missionaries travelled abroad and saw stark similarities between foreign tribes and the communities living in the north of England. To understand the images that Edwards relates to we must we must clarify why The Great Depression happened during the nineteen thirties. One of the serious mistakes that led to the Great Depression was overproduction; however this was not just a problem in industrial manufacturing, but also an agricultural matter as well. From as early as the middle of the 1920s, American farmers were producing far more food than the population was consuming. As farmers began to expand their production, they started to turn to agricultural machinery to aid their techniques due to the fact that many of the working horses had been sent to the army as part of the First World War efforts. This process both improved their productivity but it also cost a great deal of money, resulting in farmers falling into debt. Furthermore, land prices for many farmers dropped by as much as forty per cent as a result; the agricultural system began to fail which left large fragments of the population with very little money to spend which started the rise in unemployment at the time. While agriculture struggled, the manufacturing industries began to accelerate prior to the Crash of Wall Street. In the affluent period before the crash, large sections of the population were buying consumables; they were often purchases that were made by credit. And as the production continued to rapidly grow the market swiftly dried up as too many products were being produced with too few people earning enough money to actually buy them.Due to America being a world economic success prior to the Crash of Wall Street, the crash ended up affecting the whole of the western economy, including England European economies were shorn up during the twenties on the basis of American loans (Edwards, 1984 p.14). Due to the causes and effects of the crash western countries could not loan out any money from the worlds richest country to keep old outdated industrial manufacturing running, resulting in thousands of coal mines being closed down. Novelist, George Orwell explains that the machines that make the machines to keep people alive were directly dependent upon coal. So the fact that England could not borrow any money from America to update their industrial equipment as a result they could not afford to update the machinery in order to keep the coal mines open.The Worker Photography Movement of the 1920s and 1930s concentrated on the working conditions and discriminations within the factories in Germany and The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, this eventually spread to several European countries and the United Sates. Fig. 2 shows the discrimination endured by the workers in the factories in the 1900s; we see a child that is staring out of the window, longing to be free and to be a wild child, except she is imprisoned within the factory. The movement promoted the depiction of plebeian working environments and everyday life, During the thirties, documentary works appeared as the anonymous productions of photojournalists or social reformers (Edwards, 1984 p. 13). Communist connected groups of worker photographers were pressured to keep the movement on the low due to the injustices and social problems of capitalism and the creation of black-lists which prevented the workers getting work in the factories The employers campaign later led to a ban on photography in many capitalist factories, and to the creation of black-lists, i.e. a list of workers who, once fired would not be able to get work in any other factory (Burgin et al, 1979 p.79). However photography became an essential resource of information for the activists of the working class and their struggle. To get photographic news stories became a challenge due to a decrease in percentage of communists and worker photographers within the larger factories. The factories had police patrolling the shop floor and spies amongst the workers to stop images of the cruel working conditions being publicised. Eventually the images of the factories shifted from the working conditions to images of inside the machines or the facades.In a similar way to in how Worker Photographers Movement photographs were indirectly dictated by the factory owners; missionary Tom Harrison set up Mass Observation in the northern town of Bolton to document the communities in northern Britain at the time of The Great Depression. As part of Mass Observation the team photographer, Humphrey Spender created a major project called Worktown People, Photographs from Northern England 1937-38. Spender collected first-hand evidence on all the characteristics of the lives of working class people in Britain. He devised them up into eight different sections they are: Street Life, Work, Sport, Parks, Drinking, Elections, Blackpool and Funeral. However like the dictatorship with the factories during the time of the Worker Photographers Movement; Harrison also dictated to the team photographer, Humphrey Spender on how to see before taking his images. Harrison had previously spent three years living with a cannibalistic tribe in the New Hebrides, he documented the way they lived and socialised he began to see similarities between the tribes and the northern working class Britain the New Hebrides taught me the many points in common between these vivid looking, fuzzy haired, black smelly people and our own (Harrison, p.19). Around the time when Black History Month was beginning to educate and acknowledge the discrimination of the African-Americans, Harrison himself discriminated the northern working class and the tribes by basically naming the two civilisations as homeless tramps that were unable of looking after themselves and was uneducated in personal hygiene. Anyhow, Harrison therefore encouraged the team photographer (Spender) to approach the assignment to conceive of himself as an ethnographic explorer in a foreign country. (Harrison, p.19). With both Harrison and Spender being from the south, northern Britain was an alien-like country to them due to the stark differences between the two. The South and the Midlands was beginning to prosper due to new industries such as car manufacturing, electrical production and the growth of service trade; this meant that the employment rate was a lot higher down south and in the midlands compared to the north of England. Having set up Mass Observation in the south neither Harrison, Spender nor any of the other figures involved in the creation of the photographic body could truly understand what life was really like in northern Britain; Mass Observation is an independent, scientific, fact finding body, run from 82, Ladbroke Road, London (The Pub and the People, 1943, p.2). Simply knowing that Ladbroke Road is situated in the wealthy borough of Kensington, Bolton is a far cry from those riches. Fig. 3 is an image taken from Mass Observation; it shows workers enjoying social time at the pub drinking the appearance of Northern unemployment rendered the representations of a happy unified Britain highly problematic. (Harrison, p.15). Many images in Mass Observation show poverty but also images of the working class sticking together and uniting for protests against the working conditions, closures of the mines and the poverty that had stricken the people. Taking into consideration fig.3 and fig.4 the socialising and the unity that is shown within the images are a contradiction to what the situation in the north was actually like. The thirties was a time when the contradictions were already at work in thoughts that developed into cracks between the north and south divide as the poverty in the north ended up replacing the stable middle-class. Fig.4 show apprentices uniting in a strike against low pay and little training that was a regular occurrence in the workplace; other difficulties that the young apprentices had to face was their role in the workplace often conflicted with the interests of the adult employees.Comparing fig.4 and fig.5 we can see the ideologies of the north and south divide; fig.4 shows apprentices striking for better pay and an increase in job education, whereas fig.5 shows the hustle and bustle in Covent Gardens market. As Edwards says about the social class divide within Mass Observations While symbolically the documentarists might have attached themselves to the North, disassociating themselves from the bourgeois crisis, they always remained outsiders, metropolitan intellectuals, from a supposedly higher culture who needed to know the north (Edwards, 1984 p.18). The southern missionaries did not need to know the north because they had everything in the south due to its prosperity. However they did feel the need to explore the alien-like country of the north seen as they had witnessed first-hand other civilisations overseas; they wanted to explore and to understand the northern civilisation of their own country. Nevertheless the missionaries did not approach the situation to well as they referred the north to cannibalistic tribes they had visited overseas, yet the north is still part of the same country and island that is England. Therefore the snobbish views of the southern missionaries did not bide well in the north.

Chapter Two: A Comparison Between Images of The Great Depression and The Recession The effects of the 1980s Recession mirror those of The Great Depression in the 1930s. Photographer Chris Killip documented the political and social issues of working-class communities in the 1970s and 1980s. He was brought up in the aftermath of the Second World War, in a country that was ruined by war and was struggling to regain itself; Killip witnessed the hardship the workers had to endure whilst trying to put the country back on track. After being denied permission to photograph in the big industrial work places, Killip turned to photographing the industrial decline and its knock on effects within the northern local communities to these coal mine and industrial factories. Fig. 6 shows the hardship that these communities had to go through during the mass closures of the mines under Margaret Thatchers reign. Like Humphrey Spender Killip photographed within the communities of the deprived areas of England; however Killip did not photograph in the same vulgar way as Spender. The distressing image of fig.6 shows that the unemployment in coastal communities the emotion of the image is created out of Killips relationship which was formed as he immersed himself within a small group in the community of young people living in Lynemouth, he photographed this unique community of people who supported themselves by collecting coal from the sea, in comparison to Spender who did not focus on the depravity and the struggles of the north.By comparing Tom Harrisons Mass Observation with the Channel 4 documentary series, Benefits Street, one can begin to see the stark similarities between The Great Depression and the current Recession. We can relate this programme with Tom Harrisons Mass Observation as the programme has been described as cynically hawking poverty porn (Nelson, 2014). Both Harrison and the producers of Benefits Street provide vulgar entertainment for left wing supporters to ridicule the poverty in northern Britain that is happening again in this present day. Both Mass Observation and Benefits Street provide a glamorised comedy act, which is acting as a metaphorical jester for the more privileged people of Britain. Once the audience has seen the programme, they can just turn off the television and carry on with their day to day activities and lives.Benefits Street first aired in January 2014, it is a documentary series that documents the hardship and the struggles of one of Britains poorest streets, James Turner Street, Birmingham; there are probably about five percent of people on this road that are working (Benefits Street, 2014). Due to Britains Gross Domestic Product having two consecutive declines in growths in 2008, many businesses across the country were not making enough profit; as a result of this, these businesses had to create mass redundancies which lead to a high rise in unemployment and benefit claimants. By comparing fig.1 in chapter one, which is an image from Humphrey Spenders Worktown People for Mass Observation with fig.7, a still from episode one of the Channel 4 documentary series Benefits Street, they both show dirty, slum like and cramped living conditions that the unemployed people of Britain are having to live in. The houses are all in continuous rows and are very tightly knitted together with little or no garden space; there is also a dirty line down the centre that is either crowded with washing on the lines and cars or rubbish which is also where the children are seen playing. One can see in fig.7 the rubbish in the middle of the street which almost mirrors a dirty, smelly landfill site but on a miniature scale which also relates back to Harrisons opinion on the dirty tribe like civilisation of the unemployed northern working class. By analysing Harrisons opinion of the working class during The Great Depression and the visual aids of the documentary series, we can see the similarities of the stock market crash and the decline in Gross Domestic Product growth have both had a subsequent effect on the living conditions for the working class citizens of Britain. We can begin to see the similarities between his historical opinions of Harrison and the current surveillance of the unemployed communities in Britain with those of Bendiksens image of the slums in the less economically developed countries. Fig.8 is a Mumbai slum which shows the poorest community in Indias richest city. Dharavi is one of Mumbai's biggest slums, it is estimated that nearly one million people live there as it is a honeypot for jobs such as recycling and manufacturing industries. One can see the living conditions in Dharavi are dirty, cramped and smelly which we can relate back to Harrisons observation of the new overseas civilisations. Also another similarity that we can see is between fig.7 and fig.8 as they both show cramped living areas, rubbish in the central road and children playing in the streets.In contrast to the Chanel 4 documentary series, Benefits Street the BBC Panorama produced a documentary which documented the harsh working conditions employees have to endure in the global company, Amazons warehouses. Although there is high security measures in place at the warehouse such as airport style scanners and security guards which proved quite a challenge for the BBC Panorama cameras to enter the warehouse; however the BBC Panorama team managed to hide a camera on one of the employees and was able to film inside the Swansea warehouse. Having these security measures in place is almost a repeat of what happened in the factories in the 1930s when the Worker Photographers were all black-listed from taking images inside the factory buildings and documenting the harsh working environments. Some past employers have described working in the warehouse as depressing, quite, eerie and workers are in lines and lines, working like robots (BBC Panorama, 2013). Panorama approached a twenty three year old healthy graduate to go undercover for them and film inside the Swansea warehouse as an employee of the company. During the ten hour shifts the employee was under constant pressure to achieve unrealistic targets such as collecting one hundred and ten items per hour; for large industrial warehouse this style of work eventually becomes very strenuous and employees are often running from one end of the warehouse to the other. For those ten hours we are basically machines. Robots! (BBC Panorama, 2013). On average Amazon employees walk an estimated six miles each day; barrister Giles Bedloe expressed in the documentary that employees are only allowed to work eight hours on a night if the work involves heavy lifting. However in reality employees were working ten and a half hour shifts with only hour long breaks and they often walked an average of eleven miles each night. Another contemporary reference we can relate to the work of Humphrey Spender is that of the Magnum photographer, Jonas Bendiksen. In 2013 Bendiksen exhibited his work for an assignment set by Multistory and Magnum Photos to document the current working mills in West Yorkshire. Open for Business was created as a celebration to Britains manufacturing and industrial industries to remind national and international audiences that Britain was the forefront of the industrial revolution and that those industries have not yet fully died. These traditional manufacturing industries still remain critical to the success of the British economy, yet it is under documented. The focus on Britains industrial skills has acquired even greater meaning following the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, which reminded national and international audiences of our history of innovation from Brunel to Berners-Lee. (Multistory, 2012). Open for Business showcases the success that reflects Britains changing industrial and cultural heritage. The programme documents the story of British manufacturing, whilst capturing the existing landscape and its effect on the community.Likewise, fig. 9, an image by Jonas Bendiksen who played a massive role in the making of Open for Business shares similarities with that of Humphrey Spenders image see fig. 10. Bendiksen focused on these traditional ways of working and documented the struggles of what seemed like a dormant industry. Fig. 9 and Fig. 10 show the stark similarities between the 1930s mill worker and a current worker in a mill. Fig. 9 and fig.10 each show a mill worker, one in the 1930s and the other in the 2010s, although the images were taken more than eighty years apart we can see the changes that have been made and what has stayed the same. Similarities which are evident within both the images are the architecture and the identical layouts of the two mills. A part of me was very apprehensive, as its often a huge challenge to photograph industry and manufacturing. The facilities are often incredibly sterile, the machinery automatic and, more and more, one cannot really see so much of a human interaction with the process. (Bendiksen, 2013). Bendiksen himself misinterpreted the style of the factories of today; this could be due to the HM Factory Inspectorate which was formed in 1833 and more and more health and safety regulations were eventually put into place over the years since the act was created so one can easily misjudge the look and the layout of the mills. One has established earlier in this essay that The Great Depression closed down many mills and factories in northern England which is why Spenders image does not look like the typical Victorian working mill image of Lewis Hines see fig. 2. However we can see more employees in Spenders image than in Bendiksens image which shows that there was still a larger market for textiles across Britain than there is today. By 1912 the cotton industry in Britain was at its peak; but the outbreak of The First World War meant that cotton could no longer exported to overseas markets. Eventually Japan took over Britain as the leading cotton manufacturers by introducing twenty-four hour cotton production. In-between the wars, three-hundred and forty-five thousand workers left the industry to fight for the country and eight-hundred mills were eventually closed. Nowadays supply and demand is very rare due to cheaper materials and readymade garments being exported from overseas such as India or China, due to its low cost.

Conclusion

This essay has discussed the area of interest around photography and the worker. It began with outlining the historical contexts of The Great Depression and how photographers such as Lewis Hein and Humphrey Spender, who documented the decline in working conditions and also the decline in industries such as coal mining and the textile industry in the north of England. Chapter One outlined several historical events that happened during the time of The Great Depression. Mass Observation was a photographic documentation that was created by Tom Harrison in the south of England; the aim of the photographic documentary series was to capture images of the northern working class of England. The leader of Mass Observation, missionary Tom Harrison, had recently visited a New Hebrides tribe and had discussed with the team photographer, Humphrey Spender to approach the assignment as if to conceive of himself as an ethnographic explorer in a foreign country. (Harrison, p.19). This became problematic because of the false portrayal of the northern working class compared to the southern missionaries and photographers who were from a wealthy part of England did not fully understand the unity and the way of living in the northern industrial towns. Another key element this essay has discussed is the Worker Photographers Movement who documented the hardships and the struggles within the factories during the time of The Great Depression.The second part of this essay discussed the comparison between The Great Depression of the 1930s and The Recessions of the 1980s and of 2008 and the similarities of how both of these events were documented through photographs. Photographer Chris Killip documented the northern working class communities like Spender did for Worktown People; but the images were far more distressing than those of Spenders. Similarly to Mass Observation that was discussed in the first chapter, the second chapter discussed a similar contemporary body of work, Open for Business. Both Mass Observation and Open for Business showcase the industries that northern working class Britain is famous for. A vivid characteristic between the two bodies of work are the images that both Spender took in the 1930s and that of Bendiksens image taken in 2013; the essay discusses the similarities between the two images and outlines the fact that not all of the traditional business were affected by the closures during The Great Depression.Lastly this essay discusses the comparison between the historical movement The Worker Photographers with the contemporary documentary produced by the BBC Panorama on the Amazon warehouse workers. This essay has outlined the similarities of the manual working conditions that workers have to endure in the tireless factories and warehouses. Although various health and safety acts have been introduced since the 1930s to reduce the harsh working conditions; they both had and have very strong security procedures. The airport scanners and the security checks in the Amazon warehouse mirrors the black lists which were created in the 1930s to stop guerrilla photographers and journalists from reporting inside the warehouses.

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References

BBC Panorama (2013) BBC Panorama Amazon The Truth Behind the Click BBC documentary behind amazon shopping 2013. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta7hTfI69xc (accessed: 28 November 2014).Bendiksen, J. (2006). A girl walks along a water pipe in the Industrial Area of Dharavi. Available at: http://www.theplaceswelive.com/ (accessed: 27 November 2014).Bendiksen, J. (2006). Untitled. Available at: http://www.magnumphotos-commercial.com/case-study/open-for-business#!prettyPhoto[pp_gal]/6/ (accessed: 6 November 2014).Burgin, V et al. (1979) Photography: Politics One, London, Photography Workshop, p.79.Channel 4 (2014). Welcome to James Turner Street | Benefits Street (S1-Ep1). Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkKJQF1xSJU&list=PLBKfErliSueNSfswh-xPcdBE9BsgQU70T (accessed: 10 November 2014).Edwards, S. (1984). Disastrous Documents,TEN8, 15, pp13-19.Harrison, T, (unpublished). Introduction to Poles Apart, p.19.Killip, C (1982). Seacoal Beach [image]. Hong Kong: Phaidon Press Limited.Mass Observation (2009). The Pub and the People: A Worktown Study (Mass Observation Social Surveys). London, Faber & Faber, p.2.Mulford, J. (1982). Worktown People. Kent, Falling Wall Press, p.6.Nelson, F. (2014). Benefits Street: the real scandal. Available: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10579987/Benefits-Street-the-real-scandal.html. (accessed: 10 November 2014.Reid, G.D. (circa 1920). Street scene at Covent Garden with underground Station and horse and cart in the background. Available at: http://www.museumoflondonprints.com/image/139323/george-davison-reid-street-scene-at-covent-garden-20th-century (accessed: 20 November 2014).Spender, S. (1982). Worktown People [image]. Kent, Falling Wall Press.

Bibliography

Green, D. (1985). Map of Depravity, TEN8, 18Orwell, G (1974). The Road to Wigan Pier. London: Penguin Books.Ribalta, J. (2011). Worker Photography Movement. Available: http://www.foto8.com/live/worker-photography-movement/ (accessed 25 November 2014).McCormick, R. (1984). Industry. Newport, Gwent College of Higher Education, Clarence Place.

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