Men painting at Norbulingka Institute, Dharamsala, India.
Time magazine rightly named 'Lunch Atop a Skyscraper' (see article here) as one of the most recognizable photographs of the twentieth century. We all know it: men alternately eating lunches out of rectangular tins, smoking cigarettes, dangling their feet from a steel beam suspended dizzyingly above ground. I, for one, cannot identify when I first saw it: it's emblazoned in my mind's eye the way the Coca-Cola logo is, or Warhol's Soup Cans are, and retrieving an initial exposure would be like trying to determine where/when one learned the word 'skyscraper', or 'photograph', given its prevalence in 'modern' culture. Why is that image so compelling, beyond the immediate sense of vertigo? It's not its authorship, as that was unknown until relatively recently (once attributed to Lewis Hine, the photograph is now credited to Charles C. Ebbets), so the waft of celebrity held no sway. General knowledge didn't even get the building right—ironically, Rockefeller's attempted advertisement for the RCA Building was long thought to be the Empire State Building. Some would say it is, in fact, the mystery surrounding its origins that holds appeal, which was the subject of the 2012 documentary film Men at Lunch inspiring the above article. Certainly the film's creators Seán and Eamonn Ó Cualáin spent ample time researching the identities of the pictured men. They point to the 'American immigrant experience' and the 'dignity of hard work' as drawing factors—the American dream captured in one, now iconic, photograph.
Namkeen vendors near India Gate, New Delhi, India. 'Namkeen' means 'salty' or 'salty snack' in Hindi.
Others would say therein lies the problem. Houman Harouni argued, 'every artistic portrait of blue-collar men and women that portrays them as such—that is, as a class—contains a betrayal', wherein a middle-class audience essentially 'others' a group of people whose day-to-day experience bears little resemblance to their own. The would-be photographer, here, reifies class distinctions capturing workers' 'disdain' or 'indifference'. The stance seems extreme until one considers his correct assertion that depicted workers rarely haunt galleries in which their portraits are displayed. And while he lauds Iranian photographer Farideh Sakhaeifar's series where workers' snapped pictures of themselves, he ultimately questions how an industrial worker can be (humanely?) represented. Is it as Win Butler, lead singer from Arcade Fire, croons, 'What if the camera/ Really do/ Take your soul/ Oh no'?
While visiting India I took numerous pictures of male workers. What immediately led me to do so were cultural mores around photographing women: as recently as December 2016 a man was arrested for attempting to photograph a woman journalist in a public space—a legal activity in Canada and other Western countries. Lawyer-activist Pramila Nesargi's assertion that photographs may 'violat[e] the privacy of a woman' if she objects are further bolstered by a long history of white, male photographers taking orientalising photographs of Asian women and profiting from them. So to avoid the headache (though I am a mixed-race woman, therefore less visually problematic), I took pictures of men. Most of them were working. Many were in conversation, others absorbed in the task at hand, not 'indifferent' if that matters. Moreover, they're jobs are not typically 'blue-collar': I clicked florists, balloon-sellers, snack-vendors. Is this still a violation, in the sense Harouni, or even stretched, Nesargi, talked about?
Perhaps, because I cannot discount how latently/deeply our 'Skyscraper' archetype led my process.
Men selling garlands, cotton candy, and nuts near India Gate, New Delhi, India.
