Personal Project: Workday Blues
Personal Project: Workday Blues
5:30 AM. Below zero, snow crunching under the Dodge's tires. Coffee's cold, breath fogging up the window. The grain elevator's silhouette cuts the pre-dawn sky, a ghost of the past. There used to be laughter here, now just the hum of the heater. Gotta make a living and keep the lights on. But the sun's peeking over the horizon and something better is coming. One day, this old truck will take me somewhere new. For now, I gotta get to work.
These are images from a new personal project featuring David Putman and a fantastic 87 Dodge loaned to me by fellow photographer Phil Casper.
A long time ago, between graduating from photo school and starting to make photography my career again, I suffered from a bad case of burnout and ended up taking a factory job for a few years. I started as a janitor and milled sinks out of Corian for institutional bathrooms for a while, too. Eventually, I landed in the facility's sign shop, engraving control panel plates and installing machine vinyl safety graphics.
I spent many cold winter mornings in Western New York sitting in my car before the sun came up, killing time before my shift started, eating fast food breakfasts, and drinking bad coffee (as someone who can't drink coffee at all anymore, I even miss the bad stuff.) These images capture a lot of the mood that still seems fresh in my memories all these years later. I've moved on since then and built a life as an artist, but I still drive past that old factory a few times a month and remember the feeling of that cold creeping in.
I've had a lot of pre-dawn shoots this winter, and it's been cold the last few weeks. There are many reminders of those days. I got the idea in my head to create some images that captured those pre-shift blue collar rust belt vibes
