Werker 2. A Gestural History of the Young Worker

Representations of the working body in the Soviet Union and the Netherlands, exploring themes of gender, feminism and queerness

Drawing inspiration from the Worker Photography Movement of the 1920s, which saw photographers collaborating with workers and trade unions to visualize societal and political conditions from a working-class perspective, Werker 2: A Gestural History of the Young Worker reconsiders the relationship between labor and its photographic representation–in the past and in the present. The book takes as its starting point the representation of the working body in the former Soviet Union, where workers were depicted with strong, athletic bodies and resolute expressions on their faces. It combines imagery from Soviet magazines, propaganda and archives with documents from the Werker Archief in Amsterdam, with which it aims to interrogate the normative visualization and glorification of the worker’s body and the associated oppression of nonnormative bodies. The themes explored in this imaginatively constructed assemblage include gender, feminism and queerness.