Depicting work

I really enjoyed meeting Carey Young and Anna Fox at the Tate Modern... Both have photographed the workplace, from an artist's perspective. I do so as an ethnographer.

I particularly like Carey's photo of a white board taken in a call centre: white boards are everywhere in this kind of environment, but this one was special. It listed meaningless expressions to fill the telephonic void, while the staff member looked for relevant information or carried out some other task: "I'm just looking for your blah blah blah", "If you can bear with me for one moment..." and so on. Probably just an aide-memoire, but showing that these seemingly top-of-the-head expressions are just as programmed as all the rest of the dialogue. Shocking, in its own way. It's a photo I would have love to have taken myself...