Temporary exhibition at the Workers Museum, Copenhagen: 1 april 2007 – 2 september 2007:

Åge Fredslund Andersen: Women at the factory Poultry slaughterhouse, Aarhus Public Slaughterhouse

Cameras were from an early stage utilised for photographing work places at various locations in Denmark. During the 19th century the photographs arranged motives according to the directions of employers. The modes of production often took pride of place above the workers. Thus, individual “portraits” were made of machines, while workers were portrayed in large, static group images, often arranged in the shape of a pyramid, with the owner at the centre. During the 20th century, the photographs developed a more nuanced view of the world of the workers. The exhibition Photographing work displays the work of four very different photographers and their images of life at Danish work places, taking the shape of two historic focal points from the 1930s and 1950s, as well as two contemporary series from the transition to the 21st century.
The first two photographers hark back to a period when the workers´ union was expanding its level of influence, and a time when many people were employed at large manufacturing industries or construction sites. Åge Fredslund Andersen, working as a press photographer, let sympathy, proximity and social engagement impact on the images of those people he met at the work places in Aarhus during the 1930s. Two decades later, mason Knud W. Pedersen photographed his colleagues and those construction sites he was working on in Copenhagen and its vicinity. In this case, the motives are experienced from within, by somebody intimately familiar with the backbreaking work in the cold of the winter, who at the same time is capable of capturing the brotherhood and solidarity that worked to keep the large working gangs together.

The last two photographers belong in the present, where mergers and moving out production have been markers of Danish industrial work places. These facts have in various ways inspired the photographers to approach the images of work from new angles. Before the demise of the print shop at Politiken in 2004, press photographer Linda Johansen documented life at the printing press. She has emphasised the mood of the place and the exploration of shapes, colours and surfaces in her pictures, which in some instances resemble abstract compositions. Kirsten Folke Harrits’ photographs from Aarhus Flydedok (Aarhus Floating Dock), taken during the months following the bankruptcy of the shipyard in 1999, also often approach an abstraction. Several of the photographs depict the beauty of that which has been abandoned, but at the same time they document remains of the dangerous and often poisonous work that has been carried out over the years at the shipyard.

Linda Johansen: Mirror image A printer is mirrored together with the web in one of the machine’s glass doors during printing

Kirsten Folke Harrits: The gang plank tower Its silhouette mixing with the graffiti of the spray painters on the dock wall

Åge Fredslund Andersen: Chewing tobacco- and tobacco makers. A leaf damper girl carrying an armful of cigar boxes, the tobacco factory Schmalfeld

Knud W. Pedersen Joint filling without safety fencing It was rare for scaffolding during the 1950s to be fitted with safety fencing, and, indeed, one mason fell down and was killed during construction of houses in the Borgergade-Adelgade neighbourhood