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Ways of (not) Seeing Work: The Visual As a Blind Spot in WES?

The Work, Employment and Society conference held in Nottingham during September 2001 (WES 01) attracted over 320 delegates from all over the world who attended some 200 papers organized into a dozen streams. One of the most popular and well attended of these streams was entitled ‘Representations of Labour’, which spanned six sessions over the first two days of the event. Of the papers in these sessions, seven made use of visual aspects of work and employment through a variety of media. The range of work in this area was captured in one session that included a paper from Carol Wolkowitz on photographing work, a second presentation combining a photographer who worked with a poet, and a final discussion by Vivian Price, a US filmmaker who showed a video on the portrayal of female construction workers. What was interesting was that the initial call for papers for WES 01 had not specifically mentioned the ‘visual’ or ‘representation’ at all. It was only as the abstracts started to arrive in numbers that it became clear that there was a coherent stream to be built around issues of visual representations. In part what had inspired several contributions, in the absence of a formal stream, was the choice of pictures on the conference poster, which combined text with photographs by Langdon Coburn and Sebastião Salgado. During the conference a popular exhibition was staged of Salgado’s work from his ‘Terra: Struggle of the Landless’ collection, alongside an installation by Kay Syrad and Gordon MacDonald entitled ‘Making Work Visible’ (see Figure 1).