from next to the cash . . . in The Body Shop

Retail industry workers from next to the cash . . . and some resource industry workers portraits.

These images were made in the late 1980's. They were shot with the use of portable studio flash equipment and 4x5 sheet film and polaroid tests. The prints are all 16x 20 inches . The following text is from an artist's statement was used to introduce these images at the time... the bracketed text has been added later to clarify the somewhat poor writing

I am working (was) with large format colour portraits of people in their workplaces. Of two major portfolios the first, titled next to the cash . . .is taken from about 70 images of salespeople in a large shopping mall. All the stores are franchises or parts of a larger organization and are "pan-canadian" in the sense that branch outlets can be found in any major shopping centre. The products and displays are part of a larger marketing scheme and are rarely controlled at the local level. The people ( the pictures of them) who sell the goods are very different from the photographic cliché of the merchant as individualist who (rendered in black and white) stands proudly among bolts of cloth and wooden counters in a store that is probably his or her life's work. Today, many merchants are as much a part of the marketing process as the packages for the products that they sell. An employee's control over their work environment in a franchised store is comparitive small, often to the extent that their dress and deportment are dictated by the merchandiser (ie the marketing strategies set down for the franchise owner.)

Demographically, sales staff in malls are young, mainly women and well dressed, and work for below average wages. Because they (my subjects) were strangers to me, it was impossible to make the intimate likenesses often experienced in (other ) portraits. These people are important and I wanted to treat them individually when taking their picture. We used Polaroid test shots to arrive at mutually agreeable poses. For the most part we adopted a treatment akin to the images of "moguls of industry" that haunt the pages of annual reports which equate executives with their place of work by making environmental portraits of them in command of the workplace . The salespeople in "next to the cash . . ." are at the interface of our consumer culture and the public. They are in effect ambassadors to ourselves.

The second portfolio is a study of workers at the start of production , rather than at the end. Our primary industries are resource based and figure largely in the romantic self image of Canadians. Historically , our culture and livelihoods have been closely tied to our landscape, and our somewhat derogatory label of ourselves as "hewers of wood and drawers of water" has much truth in it. I have been (was) photographing people in industries such as fur processing, lumber, mining, fishing and farming as a way of learning who does this work and what these places are like. This work continues and is still untitled.*

JW 1987

* I continued to add images to the resource industry workers portfolio until 1989.