Bodo Schlack – Working Class Hero

Bodo Schlack – Working Class Hero

On this monumental photograph secreted on an MDF-Plate we see an enlarged, dripping, latex glove like the ones deployed to protect the hands from chemicals in a photo-lab. The title situates the work in the tradition of labor photography as well as within the discourses of visual cultural studies and their critique of identity. The photograph projects the iconic quality of the worker’s raised fist onto the glove itself, which separates what is to be protected from any given body. At the same time, ‘Working Class Hero’ is no less combative, and does not fall back on the rhetoric of exclusive masculinity.