Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-2022
Abstract
This essay explores the tensions, oppression, and alienation in factory workers’ relationship with their company and commodities registered in photographic aesthetics. Comparing product, portrait, and ID photos I took at a Chinese kimchi factory, I analyze how aesthetic dispositions in those photos were differentiated in the processes of preparation, review, editing, and publication. On the one hand, commodities are photographed to celebrate their virtues and value with the significant investment of time, resources, and attention to every detail. Their relationship with workers, who spend 14 hours a day making kimchi, is effectively effaced while the products are rendered appealing and relatable to potential consumers. On the other hand, workers are photographed to be identified as bodies with a few basic physical traits, representing them as replaceable bodies for factory production lines. While workers put a lot of care and attention into their appearance, attempting to register their aspirations and unique individuality in their images, the characteristic aesthetics were repressed or cropped out in the process of editing and printing for the sake of “objectivity” and efficiency. Therefore, the aesthetic, compositional, and material distinction between product photos and workers’ ID photos reifies factory workers’ alienation from the commodities and their (unsuccessful) challenges to the formation of photographic subjectivity and conventions.
Original Publication Citation
Park, Heangjin. “Reading from Cutouts: The Aesthetics of Alienation in the Photos of Chinese Factory Workers.” Anthropology and Photography 15 (April 15, 2022).
Digital Commons @ LMU & LLS Citation
Park, Heangjin, "Reading from Cutouts: The Aesthetics of Alienation in the Photos of Chinese Factory Workers" (2022). Asian and Asian American Studies Faculty Works. 66.
https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/aaas_fac/66
