Work, Workers, Archives, and Photography—the Maintenance of Stereotypes and the Struggle for Emancipation

Abstract

Work, workers, and workers’ living conditions quickly became a field of interest for photographers. Already by the middle of the 19th century there were photographs showing working people. Nevertheless, the contexts in which such photographs were taken varied considerably. The first part of this article presents, in the historical perspective, the different causes and strategies involved in making these types of documents, up to the moment when photographs began to appear that had been made by workers themselves. The movement to photograph workers, which developed in the first decades of the 20th century, is recalled in the second part of the article (using the examples of the Weimar Republic and Soviet Russia). The third part is devoted to photographic projects whose purpose was to increase the productivity of, and control over, workers. Photography is presented as a scientific tool for measuring movement and as an illustration of the most effective manners of organizing work. At the end, the Digital Repository of Worker Photography is described, as an example of work on a collection of photos and the creation of a platform permitting further work, but also as a legal and methodological problem.