Arbeit / Labour – Set 7 from the Collection and Archive of the Fotomuseum Winterthur

We each relate to work in our own personal way. We may be employed or self employed; we may have just entered the workforce and have specific goals or we may be enjoying well-earned retirement. Working to earn a living is a salient feature of bourgeois society. It defines social status and belonging, while unemployment and not working bears the menace of being ostracized. From its earliest beginnings, photography has captured how, where and under what conditions people work – not only by in-house photographers, adhering to the perspective and specifications of the management but also by freelance photographers with an open-ended, unfiltered approach to places of production and trade. In both content and motif, the exhibition Arbeit / Labour traces the transition from physical labour to automation and computer-aided work environments in conjunction with migratory movement across continents and through decades. In an exchange between applied and art photography, increasingly invisible work is shown to act as a sediment under various social circumstances.