“The Way We Worked’’ doubles as an exercise in on-the-job social history. Class figures prominently, of course. But so, too, do race, gender, technology, and even fashion. (A section of the show focuses on work attire.) The 86 photographs, which range in date from 1857 to 1987, amount to a cross-section of US society. Occupations on display include fisherman, logger, cowboy, teacher, office worker, longshoreman, factory worker, firefighter, police officer, waitress, farmer, nurse, doctor, pilot, construction worker - and that’s only a partial list.
All but eight of the photographs are in black and white. That seems fitting. Who thinks of 9-5 as an extended Kodak moment? All too often, drabber is closer to the reality of labor. Still, John Alexandrowicz’s 1973 color photograph of a Cleveland sanitation worker or the one Bill Gillette took a year earlier of farm workers hoeing rows of beets reminds us that visual enlivening can’t change the fact that so much of work, as Dr. Johnson said of human existence generally, is “a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.’’
A few of the images here were taken by famous photographers. Lewis Hine has six pictures in the show, Timothy O’Sullivan two, Russell Lee and Arthur Rothstein one each. The two miners Lee photographed in Harlan County, Ky., in 1946 stoop at nearly a right angle as they exit the mine. One all but feels the ache in their lower backs.
Most of the pictures come from those two most important names in the history of the medium: Anonymous and Unknown. That’s fitting, since work - “the toad work,’’ the poet Philip Larkin called it - is something nearly all of us have in faceless, nameless common: an identity so shared it ceases to identify.
