Work and Workers

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Work has been pictured since the tomb decoration of ancient Egypt, where farmers, brewers and craftsmen labour for eternity on behalf of the dead. Industrialisation made the worker both a modern hero and a social question. Adolph Menzel's The Iron Rolling Mill (1872–75) plunges into the glare and heat of a Silesian works as men wrestle red-hot metal, and Gustave Caillebotte's The Floor Scrapers (1875) shows three shirtless men planing a Paris floor in raking light.

Photography became a tool for reform. Lewis Hine photographed children in mills, mines and canneries for the National Child Labor Committee from 1908, and later followed the ironworkers raising the Empire State Building. Recent artists study jobs across the world: Jan Banning's Bureaucratics (2003–07) portrays civil servants at their desks in eight countries, and Ali Kazma films watchmakers, surgeons and factory workers with patient attention to skill.