Explore how yesterday's workplaces were recorded on video - and were infiltrated by it
From the late 19th century, the earliest film cameras captured thronging workers leaving their factories, their faces filling the frames of early films. Ever since, the moving image has had a close relationship with the workplaces where so many of us spend so much of our lives. As both screen technologies and the patterns of work evolved across the 20th century this relationship grew ever more varied and complex.
Film itself played every possible working role in relation to all parts of the economy, the public and the private sectors, the factory and the office - observing and documenting, dramatising and satirising, training and campaigning. In the videotape era it became ever easier for cameras to film in workplaces - and for moving images to be shown there, via players and monitors. This collection explores the working worlds of the recent past, marked by economic and technological change, a world so close to our own and yet so far away.
