You Are Not a Unique Snowflake: Desk Jobs Suck Everywhere

When Louis Quail, a photographer in the U.K., worked in an office at the age of 19, he was not a fan.

“It was the most tedious job in the world for me,” says Quail, who analyzed teachers’ pay increments in the offices of Kingston Council in Surrey, U.K. “It required just enough brain power that you couldn’t switch off. It was a slow torture.”

Since 2006, Quail has photographed offices in Russia, South Africa, Germany, the U.S., the U.K., Cambodia, United Arab Emirates, Santo Domingo and China. Municipal departments, call centers, financial brokers and commodities traders all feature in Quail’s series, Desk Job. 

It’s a topic that’s been on the tech world’s mind since Marissa Meyer, CEO of Yahoo, recently beckoned all work-from-home Yahoo employees back to the company offices. “To become the absolute best place to work,” wrote Meyer, “communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side.” On the other hand, 37signals founder James Fried says the office is in fact the last place workers want to bewhen pressed by a task demanding productivity. Efficiency wonks are anxious to see whether Meyer’s decree is a move of stupidity or one that will save Yahoo.

“As we have moved into the technical and information age, there has been a shift towards more office-based work,” says Quail of globalization. “Whatever our job title or geographical location, our tools and environment are becoming similar. It is quite perverse; to travel around the world to photograph inside an office that looks like its in Croydon [U.K.].”

Quail acknowledges he is not the first photographer to look at the peculiarities of office life. Anna Fox’sWork Stations (1988) took a swipe at Margaret Thatcher’s commerce-obsessed Britain while Lars Tunbjörk’s Office (2002) used odd moments, static partitions and contorted workers to show us it was business-as-usual for office weirdness in the new millennium. Jan Banning’s Bureaucratics (2007) expands the view of workspaces beyond the West and into developing nations. Banning’s work is less cynical than that of Fox and Tunbjörk, but still shows us that no matter where you are in the world, offices and officers are unavoidable.

At times, Quail was right on top of his worker subjects; with precious little physical, visual, or even emotional space in the pictures, Desk Job is claustrophobic. Repeated motifs such as phones, potted plants, inboxes, carpet tiles and beige fixtures in Quail’s photographs add to a uniformity of look, but also an inevitability of the office as a persistent type of work space spanning all cultures.

“The employee is defined by the few cubic meters, which exist around them. They must not just work, but live, eat, pray and occasionally sleep as if ‘chained’ to the desk in perpetuity,” says Quail.

The fact that the global economy went into melt-down half-way through his work on Desk Job is not lost on Quail. For him the photos have taken on more relevance because of the crash. “The idea was always to talk about the relationship between the individuals and their companies, a take on globalization and corporations. Now, I think even the most hardened capitalists have to review the idea of unfettered capitalism,” says Quail who believes some people pre-credit-crunch had blind faith in the private sector’s ability to check and balance.

With a quote from US Senator Elizabeth Warren, in the project statement for Desk Job, Quail cuts right to the heart of the matter — whether corporations should enjoy the same legal rights and protections as a person. At the Democratic National Convention, Warren told the crowd, “Corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love, and they die. And that matters. That matters because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people.”

As an English citizen, Quail has no dog in the fight of economic politics in the U.S., but the feeling that corporations have extended their power beyond reasonable boundaries bothers him. “I can’t help but be concerned by these increasingly large companies and their unelected CEOs with more power than presidents — seemingly accountable only to profit and their shareholder,” he says.

Touches of color and office flair sustain a glimmer of individuality for the subjects of Quail’s photographs but also provide blessed visual relief for us the viewer. Ultimately, Desk Job is about that daily cold dance between employer and employee.

“Companies tend to strive for straight lines and uncluttered office spaces, where as individuals have an urge to colonize and personalize,” says Quail. “In these pictures we see the tension but ultimately workers are intrinsic to the organizations they serve and are best placed to change them if they choose.”

Desk Job will be exhibited at Format Festival, Derby, UK from March 8th – April 7th.