Iterating on the professionalism theme, I went around london on two different days shooting street photography of professionals doing both unprofessional things (highlighting the fact that professionalism is all a performance) and ironic/juxtaposed professionals against the city that supports them.

At this time, my key reference points were Joan Didion and Christopher Lasch. Specifically, I found Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Didion and The Culture of Narcissism by Lasch particularly insightful. These works resonated with my general interest in cultural criticism, which I felt was particularly interesting in a world that seemed to be in decline and experiencing extreme volatility.

I believe these quotes best represent my position:

Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security.

The poor have always had to live for the present, but now a desperate concern for personal survival, sometimes disguised as hedonism, engulfs the middle class as well.

Cultural radicalism has become so fashionable, and so pernicious in the support it unwittingly provides for the status quo, that any criticism of contemporary society that hopes to get beneath the surface has to criticize, at the same time, much of what currently goes under the name of radicalism.

Christopher Lasch

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves. It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.

Joan Didion

The resulting work attempted to combine these texts with images, similar to the Four Corners Books publication in the Familiars series, Heart of Darkness — in which a war photographer was sent out to shoot people in Bank/City and combined quotes from The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad into a text/image book.

This was one of two iterations of this week, and the other that I showed had much better feedback and was more effective at communicating my position and tone (via feedback).