The Ironworker is adept at taking rebar and entering it into geometries of strength and endurance. For her Fringing the Cube exhibition at the VAG a few years back, Dana Claxton included a photography series (NDN Ironworkers, 2018) that shows us who these workers are and how they prepare their bodies for the job.
To emphasize their identities (beyond what titles do), Claxton shot these workers in a photography studio. Or if not in a photography studio, devoid of a worksite that, as a landscape, might reduce their contribution to ants in the service of the master's anthill.
In the late-70s/early-80s Jeff Wall did a "worker" series of low-angle head shots in the Socialist Realist style (in contrast to the "Employee of the Month" style pics often seen in fast-food restaurants?), presented as back-lit cibachrome transparencies (Young Workers, 1978-1983). The low-angle is a heroic angle that places the viewer below the venerable worker (they are hung to support that angle), as if looking up to them, in admiration.
Claxton's ironworkers come in a variety of positions (moving towards the viewer at eye level, en masse; or alone, their backs turned). They too are lit. Not as back-lit cibachromes, but what Claxton calls an "LED firebox with transmuted light jet duratrans."
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