Porter 9: Tom Price

“When we show something in a very straightforward, documentary sense, we can lose something that’s core to the experience we’re trying to communicate. Literature is a great example of how fiction, the abstract and the surreal can be employed to tell emotional truths in a way that non-fiction just can’t. And the hope for this project was that it would somehow get close to that.” – Tom Price

Porter is part of a wider series of portraits exploring industry and work, largely made in India. In his collaboration with Featherwax, a retouching studio, the intention was to take some of the ideas from the original series and condense them visually into something with more clarity and impact. Much of the credit for this goes to Featherwax, who did a brilliant job of highlighting the visual spectacle of what the porters did alongside a sense of the difficulty, precarity and dislocation experienced by the migrant workers.