WORKERS
By Jón Proppé
The workers in these photographs by Spessi have come from far away. The viewer has a difficult time though, trying to figure out where they are or where they belong. The environment is generic, it’s a cafeteria that could be anywhere, in an urban or a rural setting, in Asia Major, North America or in Iceland. Their attire is just as casual, the overalls that have become the uniform of outdoors workers the world over.
In today’s globalization borders vanish and capital flows without restrictions around the world in search for profit and interest. In the wake of the money, like patient sheepherders, come the workers that have become just as mobile as the capital itself and seemingly just as valuable. They are measurable statistics that fit nicely into the contractor’s spread sheets. They are the backup labor that Marx spoke of as a by product of capitalism, an army of people that just barely gets by in the modern industrialized environment and, are therefore always available for work. In Marx’s time these people were mostly farmers and migrant workers in agriculture. By the mid 20th century the migrant workers came from the garment, mining, shipbuilding and other established industires that were in decline at the time. And then the migrant army became mostly immigrants. This evolution has now become a global phenomenon and those that need hands during times of economic growth benefit from wars, overpopulation, failed crops and political chaos around the world. In those places there are people available and willing to go anywhere they can make a better living with hard work for little pay, because anything is better than where they come from.
Spessi’s pictures are taken in Kárahnjúkar in Iceland where an army of migrant workers has been busy for a couple of years building a huge dam and powerplant to power an aluminum smelter for a multi national corporation. In rain, storm, hail and sub-zero tempuratures they plow away in a way that has little in common with the traditional Icelandic migrant fishing and farming culture that for 11 centuries has survived, sometimes blossomed, in the lowlands of this harsh country. The work environment is as standardized as the jobs they are executing, as standardized as the blueprints of the engineers, the calculations of the economists and the plans of the contractors.
Spessi is a versatile photographer and is known equally for pictures of people, places and things. In his work he tries to portray and document reality with simplicity and honesty. His pictures don’t glorify or beautify the subject but rather find the grace and beauty that is found in every day reality. His work is modest and at the same time inquisitive, precisely because Spessi’s approach is so plain and intimate.
In the pictures the subject matter starts talking to the viewer. In the generic cafeteria in Kárahnjúkar we try to find the individual characteristics in the people even though only their faces are visible from inside their working uniforms. We notice that their food portions are large, working men’s portions. The overalls smooth out all bodily features and differences. There is not much left of the men’s characters and it is a little embarrasing to be face to face with these pictures. There’s hardly enough human presence in the reality these pictures portray that we can emphathise with them. They describe de-humanization in the favor of the work ethic and demand for progress. Still it is so that if we close our eyes and look away from the pictures it is not the generic environment that stays in our memory but rather a subtle smile or a twinkle in an eye. Such is the power of the human connection and Spessi’s pictures could be a reminder of that to Icelanders as they embrace the world of globalization and capitalism.
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