Churn :: American tech workers, a photography project

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(Updated 8.16.10) Hiring workers while laying off others is defined as churn in the language of human resources. For tech workers, churn has long been a way of life, a undeniable fact of the global economy. For a few months now I have been photographing individual tech workers, learning their stories and documenting their too often silent journeys.

This photography project is meant to maintain the integrity of the broader tech worker story without compromising the individual job seeker: Each individual is photographed in a way to conceal rather than reveal identity. Anonymous text from photographic subjects will accompany the images.

Interested in participating as a photographic subject for Churn? Please contact me at annmarie@arttrek.com. At this time, the project is focused on the greater Seattle area.

If you or someone you know is laid off, or contracting with an uncertain future then consider participating as a potential photographic subject. If you are not in this geographic area but plan on traveling here and would like to be part of the project, please let me know. As support for the project becomes available, more subjects from other geographic locations will be included.

Beautiful Sue

I met Sue Doupe over a year ago. Full of energy and a great photographer with an established photography business in family portraits and headshots for actors & business in Seattle, her beauty inspires great photography. Also a skilled actor who has taught and performed, her natural sense of drama comes out in front of the camera as well as behind it.

Of late, Sue and Lisa Ahlberg and I started getting go together for fun with our cameras for a few hours a week somewhere in the Seattle. Business, children and jobs mean we can not do it for long but actually good things don't have to last long to be meaningful.

I took this picture with the Mamiya 330s I got from another photographer, Neil Lukas. It feels both heavy and light, complex and simple. Somehow I am so comfortable and excited about it in ways that the digital doesn't always provide for me these days. There doesn't seem to be a way to easily use the flash for now so I am concentrating on natural light.

I am planning on using the medium format almost exclusively for an upcoming project, facelessness, which will talk about displaced American tech workers and their foreign counterparts caught up in the current global struggle for jobs. Not an easy subject but an important human one which impacts so many aspects of life now: can we live globally and locally? Can we leave these most personal decisions to the massive impersonal corporate decision makers who often choose profit over balanced living? Can the marketplace really work for individuals to help us mind the heart and soul we need to survive once the bills are paid?