Angela Buenning Filo

THE NEW INDIA

Workers, jobs, commerce, venture funding and ideas travel along the umbilical cord that now connects Silicon Valley in California and Bangalore, India. For the past decade, I have turned my camera on the place where I live. Photographing during the dot.com boom and bust and the economic cycles that followed, Silicon Valley was a stage on which to watch shifts in technology that were transforming the landscape around me, as well as the global economy.

To better understand the ripple effects of what was happening at home, I traveled to Bangalore, a place geographically distant from and yet now inextricably intertwined with my home. In this series I am looking for glimpses into the way technology and our globally-interconnected economies are changing Bangalore and the lives of those who live there.

Joseph Holmes

WORKSPACE

My Workspace photographs are part of an ongoing project documenting a variety of workbenches, desks, and counters, through which I seek to reveal the worker obliquely through the space’s accumulation of notes, photos, cards, tools, souvenirs, and the many intimated details of these quasi-private spaces. A workspace can represent a tug of war between personal expression and comfort on the one hand and the unyielding demands of work on the other, and the long accumulation of the tokens of that struggle, over years or even decades, can be formally beautiful in a very human and touching way.

Because I document a space exactly as I find it, never arranged for the camera, the Workspace project is necessarily a spontaneous process. I can’t, for example, call ahead and explain what I’m after without inviting the destruction of what I hope to capture. I usually find workspaces by walking in off the street with my camera and tripod and simply asking (though “simply asking” doesn’t quite convey the complex dance of explanation, skepticism, persuasion, and fascination that goes back.) What I end up capturing, then, turns out to be the work that was interrupted to answer the door.