When I started this series I knew very little about gas station attendants’ jobs. I was pursuing the idea that one does not need to travel to exotic places to find interesting people and learn something new.
In many ways my preconceived understanding of the service job in a gas station was confirmed. Gas is easily available and practically the same in any outlet, gas stations hardly differ from one another in look, setup and service. The competitive edge comes with pricing and location and finally extremely smooth service. I was expecting hugely frustrated fulfillment agents in these jobs.
To produce this series I entered the gas station and paid for gas or bought a cola. After the transaction I told the attendant that I was a photographer and that I would like to take a couple of pictures of him/her as s/he was working. Simultaneously I pulled out a ring binder with a selection of my attendant shots. When asked why I was doing this I replied that I had rarely observed anything personal in the interaction between customers and service providers and that I intended to put the individuality of the attendants in the spotlight. I usually found complete agreement when I hypothesized that most, if not all customers would not miss the attendants if they were replaced by a robot that would provide the same level of service. In the overwhelming majority of situations the person I was talking to gave me permission to hang out and take pictures of him or her. Most liked my project and wanted to help me out.
Ever since Ed Ruscha shot his famous series of 26 gasoline stations along route 66 between Los Angeles and Oklahoma City in 1962 a lot has changed. The automobile had been the symbol of freedom, mobility and progress and the gas station was its temple. Today gas is a commodity. We are used to spending a lot of time on the road and we just want to get the fill-up transaction over with quickly. The person behind the counter easily falls wayside.
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Gas station attendants differ from one another and have vastly differing backgrounds. Through this project I met men and women from Palestine, Ethiopia, Libya, a Kurdish refugee from Iraq, Italy and Mexico, locals and out-of-staters. Some took this job to pay their way through school, others saw it as their career and were thankful to have it and yet others planned to do this job for a short while to make it through a period of personal hardship. One man had just returned from his second term of active duty in Iraq and did not know yet what to do next. To see this individuality, I only had to get out of my consumer-shops-for-commodity mode and open eyes and ears.
Not unlike Ed Ruscha I use photography to document. I chose a digital camera with a fast lens to accommodate to the difficult lighting situations. Even during the day there was hardly any sunlight coming in through the often tinted windows. Inside industrial fluorescent light dominated. In order to produce decent quality tableaux my ‘after production’ sometimes involved every digital trick in the book. Despite the covert betrayal of photographic tradition in terms of the codified ‘photography as recording’, these images are equal peers to conventional photography. The changes that I executed in the digital darkroom did not aim at alienation or distortion. I mainly corrected for bad lighting. Given the alternative to turn the gas station into an on-the-fly studio with flashes, reflectors and lights, this was the better solution. (I also shied away from the ‘studio approach’ in order to avoid a situation where I had to ask for permission from owners or corporate governance. I preferred to keep the interaction between the attendant and me. ) The social situation still was intact and no staging occurred. My nimble ‘digital point and click’ approach allowed me to maintain the authenticity of the gas station atmosphere. In no situation did I give my ‘models’ instructions other than: “Just do what you have to do to do your job. ”
This series is documentary of the condition for those working at gas stations and it might be a general description of the loss of humanity in consumerism.
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