Tobi Lakmaker
Author and columnist
We often find bureaucratic language ugly, but I believe it can also produce some fine turns of phrase. An example: ‘People with a distance from the labour market.’ It sounds like an enviable position, as though they live in a grand country house, far removed from all polluting industry. As a writer, I sometimes see myself as distanced from the labour market, although the Chamber of Commerce considers me a participant, in ‘Category 901: the creative and performing arts’. Yet when I think of the labour market, I picture something like what we see in this photograph: professionalism, utmost concentration and an unceasing production line.
Alice Schippers
Endowed professor at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht and Founder of Disability Studies in the Netherlands
This photograph from 1993 shows a ‘sheltered workshop’, a protected environment outside the regular labour market, operating according to its own standards of what counts as work. My father, who was head of human resources at just such a workshop until 1999, told me about women on an assembly line who resisted when their tasks were about to be changed – they actually preferred the work we describe as mind-numbing. I heard about their experience only second-hand, through him. That is why I asked my friends and colleagues Fionn Crombie Angus, who has Down’s syndrome, and his father Jonathan, of FionnathanProductions, for their perspective. They responded: ‘Sheltered workshops isolated workers, paid less than the minimum wage and did too little to help people move into regular employment or supported entrepreneurship. There are better ways.’ The aim in 1993 was protection; the result was exclusion.
Hans Rooseboom
Conservator Fotografie
Old portrait photographs are astonishingly uniform. Photographers working in portrait studios generally did exactly what their customers wanted, namely nothing out of the ordinary. That is why everyone in old photographs is smartly dressed and posed in much the same way as everyone else.
Yet photography can be so good at showing people as they really are – and that includes when they differ from the majority, when they have something uniquely their own.
For around three quarters of a century now, photographers have increasingly been venturing beyond their studios. They set out on their own, devise their own projects and bring to light things that might otherwise escape our attention.
Sometimes, though, it is someone else who sends them out – as the Rijksmuseum has done since 1975 with its annual photography commission, focusing on a relevant social theme each year. That is why, for the theme of Care in the Netherlands, in 1993 or 1994 Roel Visser visited a sheltered workshop in Utrecht, where people with intellectual disabilities worked. They had rarely been seen before; now, at last, they were fully part of the picture.
