[matthew]

I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
- Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

People and machines at work is an important subject in photography, from early American Farm Security Administration projects to contemporary commercial photography and environmental portraits. For this assignment, let's look at the work that goes on around us and document it. As always new photographs are encouraged, although favourite images are welcome if you can also share a few words about what makes it special.

[wulinka]

Thank you Mat, just like made for me!

Work in China is different from Work as we know it, I often think of New York 100 years ago when it was growing fast and conditions might have been not unsimilar there to some places in China these days.



These are job ads, hand written in ink on paper, posted at a place near the train and bus stations of Hefei, catching the attention of in coming migrant workers.



you might have seen my series on migrant workers on a constructions sight, I think I posted it?
This one is just getting off for lunch, he is one of my student's cousins!



Seamstress in a "sweat shop", an obscure sewing factory tugged away in a small alley and set up in a small room, hosting some 20 or so women workers.

Enjoy! Uli


PS, I am spending my winter break in Germany right now, so I was lucky enough not to be hit by
the sudden onset of winter paralysing China right now.

[NT73]

Have a nice holiday Uli, although the forecast is not too good. Your shots look terrific by the way, I haven't time to look at the exif but do you use flash..e.g. on the girl worker.
My wife and I are coming to China in April ...sort of chase around the highlights tour. Beijing Xian Guilan HK, and then a week in the Maldives to get over it. Total of 18 days.

[matthew]

Uli, great pictures. I do remember the migrant worker series that you posted. I'm always amazed by the access that you have to people's lives.

I'm having a hard time with this assignment. I get very self-conscious shooting in public, especially when there are going to be people included in the photo. As a result my photos all look hurried and badly composed (because they are). I included a loophole for myself -- allowing photos of machines -- but so far I haven't gotten any of them, either.

[wulinka]

Thanks NT,
no, I didn't use a flash on the seamstress, the ambient light was nice and I cranked up the ISO on the Rebel XT.

Matthew, I like the machines as much as the girl in my shot, and thought of the picture acutally when I read your mention of machines.
I have to admid that many Chinese people are very photographer-friendly, they don't mind too much being the subject. On the other hand I think you get used to shooting people only by doing it. I know I have to make some sort of connection with my subject first, and that part is much easier in China, where privacy is less an issue than in our western cultures.

Uli

[Keith Alan]

Anyone who is familiar with my photography knows that people don't appear very often.
An hour before taking these pictures I was surfing all of my regular sites and came across this assignment, so it was still fresh in my mind.



Here's a wider angle that gives some background info--a food booth at a downtown pre-Rodeo event. They are serving some kind of Tex-Mex shish kabob and the backlit smoke was irresistable:



We still have real cowboys in Texas:


The background story is that the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo is happening right now, and to publicize the event 30+ longhorn cattle were herded along Houston Street in the heart of downtown:

[wulinka]

Hey, I love the rodeo picture of the cattle, great lighting.
Nice work.

Uli

[matthew]

Keith, the backlit smoke is great, but that poor man... he really needs a better business name.
(And I just noticed the orange construction fencing on the Longhorn's route. There's a comedy routine just waiting to happen... )

I went out in some decidedly non-Texan weather today, and got a couple of photos of people at work:

letter-carrier going to his route:


confirming his next appointment:


...it was the kind of day where I could make a snow-angel just by standing with my back to the wind.

[wulinka]

Matthew, how lucky you guys are to have such beautiful winter weather!
It just won't snow over here in Germany.....

Stunning colors in your second shot!

I dug out some more work shots, not too hard as work is an absolutely central part of life in China and
very accessible too.



a kettle maker in his little work shop in Nanjing.



A dofu (bean curd) kitchen at a large fresh market. The room was barely 10 square meters large,
but there were 5 or so people preparing everything from the soy milk to all sorts of bean curd from soy beans.



And finally the woman black smith near the river in Huainan, where people work machines that look like
they are taken straight from the 19th century.