I was just alerted to a wonderful series of photographs by Irving Penn called ‘Small Trades’, which were on show at the Getty Centre, New York, January this year.
I really like the performative in these images, the way their working clothes become costumes, and their tools their props, while they ‘act out’ their profession.
His portrait photographs, but unfortunately not this series are currently on at the London National Portrait Gallery, until 6 June 2010…
As per Getty site: “Working in Paris, London, and New York in the early 1950s, photographer Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009) created masterful representations of skilled tradespeople dressed in work clothes and carrying the tools of their occupations. A neutral backdrop and natural light provided the stage on which his subjects could present themselves with dignity and pride.” More info and images on http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/penn/index.ht…
And Getty Centre has just had an exhibition titled In Focus: The Worker presenting a photographic history of working people across many cultures. http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/focus_worker/…From the info on their site, it does though seem to be still rather focused on depicting workers in a traditional sense of a word, manual workers, who have been a much photographed subject in the history of photography – makes me wonder if that is because the painting in its history has largely depicted the aristocracy and a privileged class. Been given an interesting book recently, which was published as part of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery a few years ago, “Below Stairs”, about 400 years of painting depicting servants – will post couple of images that I like from that book soon, as I particularly like those where the servants fell asleep, and this sleep could be construed as a form of protest, though I know that in fact it depicted exhaustion. But, it did make me fantasise what would happen if workers simply fell asleep at their work place… http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/below-st…
