Images of People at Work

Images of People at Work explores Lange’s studies of people at work and the theme of labour that is so central to his oeuvre. In this chapter, these are seen alongside the recovery and re-evaluation of the social function of photographic practice that emerged in the 1970s as a critique of Modernism, and the ideological objectives and utopian aspirations of the socially engaged documentary tradition of the 1920s and 1930s—Soviet factographers, the Worker Photography movement and the seminal photographic work of Lewis Hine and Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, for whom Lange expressed admiration. Like his contemporaries, artists Jo Spence and Terry Dennett—who promoted working-class self-expression and distanced themselves from art photography through their Photography Workshop and the photographic journal Camerawork—Lange’s depictions of workers offer new dimensions to a realist, socially engaged documentary tradition. He sided with the workers rather than addressing labour for a political argument, contrasting with the more programmatic articulations of his radical left and feminist contemporaries. Lange’s Work Studies examine work in its manifold meanings, including the working body, the notion of skill, and work as an expression of class and identity.