Day Job at the Print Center

It was my responsibility to arrange the shots, notify everyone involved, and accompany the photographer on the day to make sure all the details were nailed down. Which is how I found myself riding the Market-Frankford El one morning with the giant scissors.

Though tedious, organizing pictures provided me an opportunity to observe photographers at work. It also inspired me to buy a 35mm camera and start shooting, which further deepened my appreciation for photography and its practitioners.

That’s why I wanted to see The Print Center exhibit Day Job, which showcases six photographers who transform mundane assignments into art.

Beyond expectations

I could not be a wedding photographer like Bill McCullough, lugging equipment, herding large groups, navigating family fault lines, and cajoling tense and emotional subjects at high-pressure, once-only events, every weekend.

McCullough, however, turns his lens to glimpse things that don’t show up in wedding albums, which are often more evocative than the expected poses. In Chinese Scene (2007), women relax on comfortable sofas and around tables filled with empty mugs. A clock reads five minutes to two in the morning, and they appear satisfied and tired. In Photo Booth (2009), McCullough pulls the curtain aside, simultaneously depicting guests mugging for the automatic camera, and those waiting to enter, expressionless and oblivious to the live photographer in their midst. Close Encounters (2011) encapsulates the inherent dichotomy in McCullough’s work: Three women and a girl are photographed from behind, standing, festive dresses creased and hair mussed. Instead of seeing them as they are, we imagine them when the day began, crisp and combed, they way they’ll appear in the album.

Shooting for a living

While photographing foreclosed houses for a real estate client, Justin Audet recorded details in the surrounding urban landscape, rusted decorative edging (Fence, 2013/2014), a broken awning (Awning, 2013/2014) and a banded stack of sun-browned Philadelphia Inquirers decaying on a weedy pavement (Newspapers, 2013/2014). The melancholy details imply the passing of time and lost chances.

Larry Fink’s task was to document a retirement-saving conference for a Spanish bank. His image on a poster entitled “How Long Will We Live?” is particularly effective. Showing a speaker’s hands gripping the podium, we see not the speaker but, just beyond the podium and framed by the mic, an older woman, face tilted up, listening intently.

Giving the familiar a second look

Chelsea Griffith’s photographs in Day Job depict funeral homes like the one her family operated. There is no doubt where we are in some prints, such as Corners (2014), with its selection of caskets and gowns. Interestingly, the queer funereal feeling persists in Griffith’s generic images. Even snaps of water fountains and stairs (Lobby, Breezeway, both 2014) evoke the somber mood familiar to anyone who has frequented these rarely photographed interiors.

As a University of Pennsylvania professor in computer and information sciences, Benjamin Pierce works at ground zero for the digital age; Penn is home to ENIAC, the first general-purpose computer. In Secrets of ENIAC, Pierce created surreal images that are as mysterious to most of us, at least, as the inner workings of a computer. He shows us fragments of circuits, a glass vessel filled with clear liquid, copper wires partly encased in rose sheathing, and tubes seen through a grit-spattered pane, all of which can be admired in blissful ignorance of what they are or do.

As a onetime cubicle-dweller, I instantly recognize the oeuvre of Steven Ahlgren, who became a photographer after working in financial institutions. His Inside the Office images depict the late 20th-century workplace in all of its blandly carpeted, drop-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit, imagination-deprived glory. The frames bear no hint of humanity, except for footprints on one of the thicker carpets (probably an executive cubicle). Ahlgren’s work leaves us wondering what happened to the people in these organizational deserts and provides evidence that at least one made good.

Above right: Benjamin Pierce, Secrets of ENIAC IV, 2004.