Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london
These photographs have been added to the gallery “The Visibles” please click here to view.
My gaze is once again focussed on bright orange men. I don’t know what it is, but they just keep catching my eye. Someone in health and safety must have decided that we need to be able to see workmen & refuse collectors from miles away just in case we, umm, walk into them? Mistake them for civilians? Engage them in conversation? I’m not quite sure why they felt there was a need to convert all street workers into neon luminous blobs but they did and now I find myself mesmerised by their colourful outfits. I’m like a bunny in headlights.
Maybe we should go the whole hog and colour coordinate all professions rendering all individuals nothing more than their occupation. Eg Health workers in green, stock brokers in gold, white collar workers in white, politicians in bullshit brown etc etc That way you wouldn’t have to ask anyone what they did for a living. Wouldn’t that be nice? And as people in similar professions tend to congregate together it would also look pretty as everyone would be colour coordinated. So you could judge someone immediately and it would be visually appealing – win win.
There does seem to be a dehumanising quality to uniform, it blinds you to the person inside, especially when they are in hi-vis wear they somehow become even more invisible. This is why it is always so popular in dictatorial regimes where they want you to be part of the working collective, not to view yourself or be seen as an individual. Without being able to implement uniforms in every industry as I have outlined above, they achieve the same goal by simply increase work hours & stress and pressure till your entire existence is just your job and all you do apart from it is recover from it.
Portable devices now mean that people never in fact leave the office, they bring it with them everywhere they go. The American work ethos of always being ‘on’ seems to have now established itself fully into British society and is becoming the accepted way. There is currently a law being proposed in France which would make it illegal for you to look at emails outside of work hours. The new rolling work day is now so entrenched here I could imagine people actually fighting against it if they tried to implement here. I mean, what ever happened to 9 to 5? What happened to down time? And what about poor Sheena Easton? She’d be pissed bored waiting for her baby to come home in this day and age and then when he did just be on his android for the rest of the night. Not an actual android obviously..that’s a little further into the future.
p.s I just looked up the sheena easton 9 to 5 video to check the lyrics and found this bizarre upload…someone, in an ingenious method to not have it blocked for copyright, has spliced it together in non-sequential order and reversed it – it now makes this already bizarre video involving her polishing a steam engine amongst other things even more surreal. Below for your viewing pleasure…