Working lives c. 1900: A Photographic Essay

Abstract

Working Lives envelops the reader visually and textually into the industrial world of work on ‘the Flat’ in Dunedin, circa 1900. Erik Olssen has built a collection of photographs, paintings and cartoons to reveal a time when direct relationships between workers and employers, skill and what was crafted, were valued and primarily local. If you were treated badly at work, you had direct access to your employer and their reputation. If you purchased a pair of shoes that had a fault in the seam, you knew who had made them and the standard of their work mattered. This book invites us to celebrate community, and then to mourn its loss, because deindustrialisation has eradicated such industrial workplace communities over the last thirty years.