Where We Worked: A Celebration of America's Workers and the Nation They Built
Spanning from the 1830s to the 1930s, this presentation of the American world of work also bridges labor’s transition from manual to mechanized production. Illustrating toil and toilers with hundreds of photographs, Larkin personalizes history with workers’ life stories, such that the text reads in sections like Studs Terkel’s oral history Working (1974). That effect arises from Larkin’s quotation of testimonies taken by the New Deal’s Federal Writers Project and the inclusion of the occupational histories of his streetcar motorman father, farmer grandfather, and machinist father-in-law. Their jobs fall into Larkin’s overall organization of labor into agriculture, trades, mining and manufacturing, and office work. Larkin favors posed pictures of people with their implements, a sound decision for helping encapsulate the subjects’ attitudes about their work. Pride animates many images, but so do wear, hazard, and tedium, especially in photographs of child workers. Touching just tangentially on economics and unions, Larkin’s visually absorbing volume appeals as an individualizing expression of labor history. --Gilbert Taylor