Framing the Shots
By Julian Kilker
What work does photography involve? How can it document the world around us? Photographers have explored the intersections between the technologies at play and the humanity it can portray since the field’s beginning.
First, a little detour: As the invention of photography was nearing the century mark, in 1937, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) featured a comprehensive exhibit curated by Beaumont Newhall. (The exhibit’s catalog was the basis for five editions of Newhall’s influential History of Photography textbook.) Visitors first encountered a giant box camera into which they could step and view, on a frosted glass screen, upside-down images of people entering the building. Curator Sophie Hackett points out that Newhall’s curation, combining as it did “photographic objects and equipment, along with didactic displays” focused on technology and enabled Newhall to “dissociate the photographer from the photograph.”
Eighty-seven years later, the core questions raised in that pioneer exhibit continue through the current Nevada Humanities Exhibition Series, Hidden Faces of Work: Behind Las Vegas’s Non-Stop Economy now on display at the Nevada Humanities Program Gallery in Las Vegas. With synthetic digital and AI imagery proliferating, what does it now mean to practice photography? When everyone with a phone can capture and distribute photographs, who is now a “photographer”?
Hidden Faces explores “invisible” labor captured through the lenses of student photographers. Their assignment: To learn through exploration how to create visual stories about workers that engage with diverse audiences. For the exhibit, students photographed, interviewed, and researched workers in 22 contexts as part of my course at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Although Las Vegas is a modern metropolis with a diverse workforce, and rural Nevada includes agricultural, mining, and military populations, Nevada is a predominately tourism-based, service-sector economy that, according to the U.S. Census, combines higher than average salaries and lower than average educational attainment. Most of the student photographers work while attending school and have faced financial precarity in a gig economy; the workers they document reflect the diversity of the students’ interests and contacts.
We focused on documenting “invisible” work because entire labor categories are overlooked, because service-sector work is frequently physically or figuratively “backstage,” and because the complexities of other people’s work is often unappreciated. Photography itself fits into the last category: On the surface accessible and straightforward, a serious pursuit of photography involves refining a wide range of “hard” (technical) and “soft” (social) skills. In photography “tacit knowledge” is important—its technical and social processes are difficult to formalize, communicate, and teach. Thus, this course focused on mentorship from knowledgeable guest speakers and myself, experiential problem-solving, and deepening skills and creative approaches.
In addition to the 39 student photographs on display, several of which are featured in this blog post, the exhibit also includes a “Framing the Shot” interactive piece in homage to MoMA’s large camera. This piece allows visitors—as they document themselves through a picture frame—to make lighting and composition decisions just as the students did while planning their portraits. Consider: How is your own area of work usually photographed, and what’s missing from such representations? How would you design your own visual story?
The Hidden Faces of Work: Behind Las Vegas’ Non-Stop Economy is on display April 5 – May 29, 2024, at the Nevada Humanities Program Gallery in Las Vegas. Learn more about this exhibition here.
This exhibit features work by Julieta Aldrete, Kendall Banas, José Blea, Gizzell Contreras, Cynthia Covarrubias, Joshua Cruzado, Xayve Diaz, Jero Guerra, Joshua Harris, Lynnsie Holloway, Desiree Jacobo, Julian Kilker, Seth Kordich, Miriam Lachica, Chassidy Lynn, Angelo Masangkay, Adriana Orchard, Isabella Pupo, Adryan Qujiano, Julia Sidley, Nickolas Tanouye, Joy Villanueva, and Brandon Wong, as well as a historic image selected by Aaron Mayes from the Warren A. Bechtel Photographic Album, UNLV, University Libraries Special Collections and Archives.
I’d like to thank the generous skilled community who helped make this project happen: Bobbie Ann Howell and Patty Dominguez of Nevada Humanities for advising me on the exhibit process and mounting it in record time; Checko Salgado for curation advice and providing test paper from Hahnemühle; guest speaker-mentors Aaron Mayes of UNLV Libraries Special Collections (who also loaned the mirror for “Framing the Shot”), Deanne Sole of UNLV’s Barrick Museum, drone and environmental photography expert Paula Jacoby-Garrett, and photographer-filmmaker Shahab Zargari; the UNLV School of Journalism and Media Studies for providing camera equipment; and the NAB and WPPI trade shows for allowing students to explore the latest visual technologies. Finally, a special thanks to all the workers who kindly gave their time and allowed their stories to be featured in this exhibit.