Nothing very profound about that. And yet, in the world of television, work is rarely given a context. This too will come as no surprise to those who study television and advertising. The images that tv ads assemble and string together are, by their very nature, photographically decontextualized. Images are taken out of context and reassembled according to the narrative directed by the advertiser's agenda.
Photographs always abstract, and freeze, some tiny moment of a wider set of relations.
Indeed, in the world of tv ads, images of work, employees, and workplaces are more often chosen for their functionality as signifiers. Let me show you. Advertising takes advantage of its capacity for freezing a moment and lifting it out of context to create a more loaded, more focused, signifier. To visually highlight this point, I have assembled a brief page that begins the task of identifying commonplace signifiers of work and the ways in which they can be isolated to signify a general rather than a particular meaning. Look at the first image I have selected there, the image of a man wearing a hardhat.