The Labors of Looking

Unseenamerica on Long Island: A First Look at the Latin American Caribbean Center, October 9-December 12, 2001, and the Stony Brook Union Art Gallery, Long Island, N.Y., October 16-31, 2001. Unseenamerica at the Department of Labor, Washington, D.C., May 13-30, 2003. We see what we know. What's hard to see is the unknown, and then to understand what we're looking at, to make sense of what we see. 1 —Anonymous Workplace Project participant In fall 2002, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao invited the Bread and Roses Cultural Project, of New York's Health and Human Service Union, 1199/SEIU (Service Employees International Union), to display a selection of photographs from their unseenamerica project at the Department of Labor. Unseenamerica is the first nationwide project to provide photography workshops to groups of workers and to present these images in exhibition form to audiences both within and outside their communities.2 After Bread and Roses' executive director Esther Cohen accepted Chao's offer, she and fellow staff members traveled to Washington, D.C. to view the gallery space,which they discoveredwas located within the massive lobby of the building. This created a dilemma for the staff. Despite the lobby's monumentality, it is nonetheless an entryway, a transient if imposing space designed so that people pass through, rather than inhabit, the room. Thus Bread and Roses' staff members had to think about how to construct the exhibition in such a way that the images actually had an impact in the space, to encourage those passing by to engage with the images. They did this by having the photographs printed much larger than they had been when displayed in local exhibitions. As Esther Cohen noted about their exhibition plans, "The idea was to be strong and visible in that environment, official and big."3 [End Page 1035] Bread and Roses' experience designing the exhibition for the Department of Labor gallery space can be seen as a metaphor for their attempts to deal with the labor policies of the current political administration, which in turn serves to contain and appropriate counterdiscourses for its own ends. Just as Bread and Roses had to think of ways for the unseenamerica photographs to have a significant presence in the lobby/gallery, the organization has also struggled to have a presence within the purview of the Department of Labor. The impact of the exhibition could potentially be diminished by both the transient space of the lobby and the institution's ironically pro-business labor politics. Since Bread and Roses launched unseenamerica in 2000, the organization has developed at least three primary goals for the project. The first goal is to empower workers by giving them the means of self-representation; the second is to create images that will make visible the labor of working-class people and increase appreciation of their contributions to U.S. society; and the third is to promote the enactment of legislation to improve the lives of low-wage laborers in the United States.4 While unseenamerica started in New York State, workshops have been initiated throughout the United States since 2000, most recently in West Virginia, South Dakota, California, and Wisconsin. In the last four years, more than 120 groups have become involved in unseenamerica. What distinguishes unseenamerica from the work of other photographers who have documented the lives of the working poor is that the "subjects" themselves are taking the pictures.5 Thus, the documentary work of unseenamerica participants can be set apart from the social documentary photographic legacies of Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and others. Unlike the reformist work of Progressive Era photographers, such as Hine's involvement with the National Child Labor Commission, and Lange's and Evans's work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the 1930s, which portrayed workers' personal heroism in the face of overwhelming hardship, the work of the unseenamerica participants does not

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