Andrew McGrath, "Force of Labor", contributed by Andrew McGrath, Center for Ethnography, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 11 December 2018, accessed 20 May 2024. http://www.centerforethnography.org/content/force-labor
Critical Commentary
This image was created to embody the intersection of landscape, aesthetics, and the precarity of new labor practices in the Inland Empire. The white warehouse that stretches across frame is a distribution center being built. The Santa Ana winds that blow across it point to the precarity of enacting any kind of labor in an environment so subsumed by the realities of climate. The lack of human bodies in-frame point to the ambivalence of neoliberal ideologues towards the labor of people, especially when the future of the warehouse business is automated.