Working Class Heroes, 2014
With this series of portraits of workers, which the photographer poses frontally and integrates by a game of superimposition in their factory, Olivier Coulange questions both the worker’s condition and the ambivalent relationship that these subjects have with their work tools. Symbol of a disinherited economy, where fear of recession and fear of pure and simple disappearance go hand in hand, the industrial world imposes violent structural changes on its human component: relocations, intensification of production rates and job cuts.
Workers who, in the collective imagination, seemed bound to their factories by a common history of sacrifice at the service of a productivity ideal, are today bound by the fear of layoffs and their replacement by machines or by others elsewhere. The fusion, within color images, of black and white portraits documenting the history of the working class world, underlines the permanence of the places and the integration of the worker in his environment.
—
Hôtel Paul Delaroche
58 rue Saint Lazare, 75009 Paris
+33 1 53 01 85 85
—
