Text and images used by permission.
In her extraordinary series of self-portraits, Happy Workers, Enid Crow draws on her experience as an actor, teacher, researcher, writer, and artist-photographer to create imaginary employees, each from a different corner of the world of work. She starts with the clothes, maybe corporate dress (shirts, ties, pocket pens), or perhaps, branded uniforms (fast-food restaurants, chain stores, public transport); many outfits are harvested from eBay. She adds wigs (she has 200) and wildly transformative theatrical makeup to play a range of characters against the background of their everyday workplaces. The artist is a shape-shifter, and each transformation is a convincing yet slightly exaggerated bit of make-believe. For each image, Crow combs the literature of "labor" (books, advertisements, social media, lawsuits, message threads) for a quote from a real-world source to add point-of-view, personality, and drama to the finished artwork.
Crow's photographic style is intentionally plain and snapshot-like, rooted in the vernacular tradition, but these otherwise familiar scenes are alive. They crackle with satire, irony, pathos, and humanity. Happy Workers probes an essential contradiction: work can be frustrating, stressful, and alienating, but it can also be a source of pride, achievement, recognition, and a sense of self. Gently political, she uses humor and theatrical role-play to explore the cultural landscape of work: gender roles, status stratification, and the personal, social, and financial demands of hustling for a buck.
