You Should Quit Your Job

22 Jul

A tongue-in-cheek editorial on the topic of the pressure to perform in the modern workspace. This project came about as all good artwork does, from a place of frustration and need to express it healthily. Over the past few years, I have watched and experienced a changing industry and wider changing attitudes to work that have naturally caused me some stress. I’ve seen a rise of a new kind of “leadership”, routed in ego and often taught for a high price as part of a coaching system or a self help book. Long gone are the days of a job for life, in fact keeping hold of a job for more than a year seems almost impossible for young people.

This made me think a log about my parent’s and their peers. My father was seen as indispensable, a trusted figure with knowledge and value. He would be invited to talk widely about his experiences, and above all else he would constantly push for better. My father was a journalist and a charity worker, so he travelled a lot for work and as I child I resented how he’d disappear for weeks on end. That hard work, all that time, was for a good cause and lead him to help countless people as well as produce work he cared so deeply about. That was my blueprint for approaching my career, and I have never once thought twice about the late nights or the long shoot days. I love what I do, and so I do it. But in recent years it feels like my 10 years of experience count for very little when met with a growing attitude that workers are replaceable. Most of all, where my parents had respect and loyalty, I have found myself and my peers frequently thrown to the kerb with nothing but this months pay in our back pocket, and that’s if you’re lucky enough to get paid at all, purely down to the whim of management or mercury being in retrograde.

That’s just the traditional in-house system. As a full time freelancer I know the paid of chasing invoices, feeling like a perpetual email sender, constantly trying to figure out a way to “create content” that doesn’t feel like I’m selling my soul and of course there’s the endless accounting too. Sometimes it feels like I’m only using my actual skill set 10% of the time, and I know a lot of us feel this way.

One day, all these frustrations boiled over for me after a brief dalliance with a part time in-house position where I saw again and again talented people being under appreciated and bad decisions being made from management. It reminded me how lucky I am to be able to work for myself and how wonderful to be able to put into visuals how I was feeling. So this is my *** you to all the bad bosses and my “I see you” to all the good, talented and underrated staff out there. You should, maybe, in an ideal world, perhaps not today but soon, quit your job.

Inspired by the visual language of the offices my parents and their peers inhabited, the set was created with love using genuine items from those desks. I was heavily inspired by both the historical expectations of a workplace, and the reality that most of us now work from home so wanted to juxtapose that experience especially with the styling which featured a twist on traditional formal workwear. I also experimented with the retouched imagery in a physical sense, further exploring the emotional impact of working in a pressurised environment.

Special thanks to my dear friend Kit for sourcing and lending me some very personal props for this set. It was an honour to feature items belonging to our late fathers in this editorial, I hope they’d both find it very amusing. And endless thanks to the fantastic team that helped me bring this all together, and brought with them their own experiences and stories of the industry. I hope you found this as cathartic as I did.