Morechroe Company, “Office and Factory Staff, the Fisher Body Ohio, 1926”

#somereallygoodones, #morechroecompany, #americangroups, #workforce

Work, work, work. The notion of a work force seems so quintessentially American with Henry Ford and his Model T assembly line in the 1920s. Actually the assembly line dates back to Eli Whitney who also patented a form of cotton gin in the eighteenth century. Work force also describes the enormous union movement in the US.

In the history of American photography, there are astonishing images of different sized work forces but there doesn’t seem to have been a great deal of attention paid to works like these in the photo histories. There don’t seem to be so many of these pictures to be found relative to the endless number of single portraits. People must have run out of room to store them in. Or they didn’t know who all the people were so why bother.

They were difficult to make. First of all, you needed a lot of people in one place and then you had to have gotten them to cooperate while the photographer tried to make the picture. It’s not so easy trying to get everyone in the frame, at the same moment, all facing forward, all smiling.

These works are curiosities that got rolled up and stuffed into a closet or they are the framed ones left on the wall in the attic or cellar that slowly faded and yellowed and collected dust.

It’s a shame because these images have handsomeness and history. There is a nobility in work, and the groupings of men and women are emblematic of that. It’s easier to find military formations; civilian gatherings seem rarer. They’re documentary records, but they have aesthetic appeal. They can be like jazz: complex, patterned, layered, repetitious, and familiar, part of the vernacular. They can be shapely; they can be raucous.

They don’t behave like the photographs with which we have more experience — family portraits or landscapes or still lifes.

They can also be divinely funny. Who are these people, what are these people doing? Most often that information as well as the makers’ identify are lost to us.

It even takes work to look at them. Your eye sweeps along and goes up and down and zooms in and out trying to see all of those little faces.

Morechroe Company, “Office and Factory Staff, the Fisher Body Ohio Co’y,
Cleveland, Ohio, September 21, 1926”

There is the surprising charge of energy in the chaotic mob of Morechroe Studio 1926 Fisher Body workers on their break. There is a rambunctious, agitated quality to this. Work seems be such a primal force, and this is a spectacular slice of American life at the end of the first quarter of the modern era.

These photographs transcend their record keeping banality. They’re patriotic anthems. The prints begin to look like fantastical, absurd hybrids of Chinese scrolls or unwieldy scores of modern music with the black quarter notes and white half notes and rests dancing along the horizon.

Arthur S. Mole (1889–1983) & John D. Thomas (American, died 1947)
The Human Liberty Bell; 25000 officers and men at Camp Dix, New Jersey, ca. 1918 / Human Statue of Liberty; 18,000 officers and men at Camp Dodge, Des Moines, Ia., ca. 1917/18

The sight of thousands of soldiers or sailers in these gathered in formation is surreal, in these “Living Photographs”. The frame is compactly and completely filled with assemblies of over 10,000 troops into the iconic Mole & Thomas’ Liberty Bell and Statue of Liberty.

We seem to be looking through another end of the lens.

How many in a group?

Heigh-ho

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, heigh ho

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho

It's off to work we go

Heigh-ho

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho

It’s off to work we go

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho

Heigh-ho, hum

“Heigh Ho”, Frank Churchill (music) and Larry Morey (lyrics), 1937

For Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’

#somereallygoodones, #theunseeneye, #wmhunt, #collectiondancingbear, #collectionblindpirate, #greatphotographs, #howilookatphotographs, #photographsfromtheunconsicous, #collectingislikerunningaroundinathunderstorm hopingyoullbehitbylightning, #aphotographsogooditmakesyoufartlightning, #photographychangeditlifeitgavemeone, #morechroecompany, #americangroups, #workforce