Workspace (2007-2009)... Photographer Joseph O. Holmes

The Workspace project is my ongoing attempt to examine the quasi-private spaces people carve out of their public work lives. Such spaces represent a tug of war between personal expression and comfort on the one hand and the unyielding demands of work on the other. The long-term accumulation of the tokens of that struggle, over years or even decades, can be formally beautiful in a very human and touching way. The project is part of a larger series in which I ask friends and strangers to open up private spaces to my camera.
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. Lately I've been finding workspaces by walking in off the street with 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 and forth). What I end up capturing, then, turns out to be the work that was interrupted to answer the door.