MEN AT WORK

The day job

"Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do."

 Oscar Wilde

“It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?”

Ronald Reagan

You have to wonder, was there ever anybody who thought their idea of the perfect job is to sit behind a desk signing pieces of paper all day? If that person existed then the way fate works they probably ended up being a test pilot, quietly bitter like most of us because things hadn’t quite turned out how they’d thought they would. ‘Pen pusher’ is so derogatory not many want to admit that’s what they do but how many solicitors seriously regard contracts as anything other than standard forms composed in a specific language which they merely have to append a signature and a date to? And don’t get me started on notaries. The old term, scrivener, is much more appropriate; it suggests some shrivelled old man scratching his autograph across a document for which the client has the privilege of paying out a small fortune. At least accountants, the archetype of the dull profession, can occasionally boast of working minor miracles with numbers. It isn’t the case so much anymore but public servants in Australia had Friday lunchtime to look forward to, when the hours slowly melded into the night and without the imposition of cell phones they felt no obligation to call home.

One noable thing about these photos is the paraphernalia. Every desk used to require a blotting pad, a jar of pens and various chrome items, some of which were there for appearances’ sake. One has to be suspicious of a very neat and minimally decorated desk. It suggests the occupant has time to put the chrome items in order. A cluttered desk – there aren’t many here – indicates the worker is busily moving from one task to the next, living by the principle that he knows in his own head where each piece of paper is should he need to find it in a hurry. Like a personalized writing set, a cluttered desk is also a sign of higher authority. Until the concept of time and management was invented, an untidy desk also meant a good worker. Such men are, or were - the computer has also robbed many clerks of their dignity – the best administrators, even if the rulebooks said they weren’t. For those types, wrestling order out of chaos was a matter of personal honour. The chaotic workspace was evidence of creativity; they were testing themselves against the monotony. When the chips were down, they were the ones to get everybody else out of the mess. Not surprisingly, they were also the ones who stayed longest at Friday lunch and burnt out with the loudest crash. 

 Throughout the long years of the 1950s and 60s American television relentlessly pushed the idea that a man behind a relatively clean desk was the ideal citizen. Whenever Ward Cleaver in Leave it to Beaver, both Darrins in Bewitched, and the father in My Three Sons were filmed at work they were in situation not far removed from the men in these photos find themselves. Primarily they were supposed to represent the middle class heartland but they also invoked a desirable lack of ambition. You only needed a few things in middle America – a family, of course, a house, a car and a stable desk job that would see you through to retirement. To ask for more was to demand too much. It is easy now to look back and think of that certainty as precious, but TV Land also promoted a world where you were expected to be grateful for small things, never question or doubt and certainly never push. Several of the men in these photos are in the Turkish military, which in the 1940s and 50s was a dark and strange place to be, but in the imagery at least they represent similar values to America; the one deigned desirable in the media anyway. They know their place.

There is a difference. Most of these photographs reveal a shabbiness American TV would never have allowed to show through in its imaginary world. The walls need a lick of paint, there is inexplicable stuff attached to some of them, most of these people are working in tiny, cramped and probably depressing offices. They are middle management; they will always be told they are respected for their loyalty and dedication but this is about as far as they will rise.

There are so many snapshots of men at their desks in Turkey they could be classified as a genre, and since there appears to be relatively few from America or Western Europe, you have to ask why. Maybe it was a small badge of honour in Turkey to be photographed at the desk, though not many of the men here appear to be in love with their work. If anything the pictures confirm they were experiencing the same drudgery as every other white-collar worker in the world. Excepting a couple, they look too casually composed to be promotional. Maybe, like the proliferation of Turkish snapshots of people in hospital, they are one of those incidental cultural expressions that no one thought worth commenting on at the time. Now digitalization has made photography so perfunctory we are left with unsatisfying speculation.

VIEW THE GALLERY HERE

MEN AT WORK

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY

Occupational Cartes de Visite
“Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.”
Oscar Wilde

By definition a profession requires a university education and a trade time spent learning the ropes as an apprentice. Occupation refers to the means by which someone makes a living. In London Labour and the London Poor Henry Mayhew listed hundreds of occupations from costermongering to street criers that have vanished from his city today. Dictionaries of historical slang make it evident that the Victorian underworld was as structured and stratified as polite society. The thief who stole the ladders from night carts and used them to break into houses were somewhat lower in status that the pickpockets. Then there were occupations like bookselling, which were legal although survival and prosperity depended on a ruthless streak and the negation of all scruples. A good bookseller saw nothing wrong in forging plates and rebinding someone else’s work to call it their own. If you want to know why Marx was so popular in the 19th century you only have to look at the economic structure of the labour market. Somebody had to try to restore its sanity.

In a sense all cartes de visite are occupational portraits since the people who sat for the photographer intended to show their position in society and in a rigidly stratified world a man’s moustache and the cut of his coat were evidence of where he stood, but so to was the uniform and the tools of his trade. We have been left with an abundance of images of carpenters, cobblers, priests, scholars, domestics, bankers and merchants. We can safely say that someone photographed every occupation in the 19th century and it’s our good fortune that a lot of these photographs still survive.

Travellers to the Orient tended as a matter of course to photograph representatives of the various occupations they encountered and it is easy enough to tell whether a CDV of a street trader was intended as an example or as a more subjective portrait. Most were the former so the rickshaw hauler or the Egyptian barber were inevitably types rather than individuals. With Europeans it’s a little harder to tell. We know that Charles Fredericks and Jeremiah Gurney received commissions to photograph American Civil War officers and sometimes all the members of a particular unit, and probably the same happened in Europe. Some of the military portraits floating about today must have originally been elements from such projects. There were also socially concerned photographers like Paul Martin who documented the inhabitants of slums though their focus was just as narrow. The only example that springs to mind of a European who set out to photograph other Europeans as a systematic typology of occupations was William Carrick in Russia. Presumably other photographers thought the idea too ambitious and not economically viable.

It has been left to us to construct the typology, which is not such a bad thing. Being removed by time and blessed with a certain ignorance we are more inclined to be democratic. To us a carpenter, an army officer and a domestic occupy the same level of interest when in their world they had little to do with one another socially and did their best to keep it that way. There’s always an issue when constructing these systems as to when and whether we stop seeing the subjects as individuals and see them as representations instead. Then again, the CDV format and the limited approaches photographers used tended to reduce people to types anyway. If we see ‘the soldier’ instead of ‘a soldier’, it’s quite likely the photographer dealing with a few dozen customers every day did too.

VIEW THE GALLERY HERE

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY