Officialdom, a photographic study by Jan Banning, is an extraordinary and compassionate portrait of bureaucrats at their desks
People sneer and call them pen-pushers. But it's usually paper they are pushing round and they go by less pejorative names: development co-ordinators, revenue agents, licensing directors, enforcement officers, sub-deputy assistant clerks. Bureaucracy doesn't always wear a uniform these days and, in less impoverished parts of the world, pen and paper have been replaced by computers. But there's always a desk. And when you're in trouble or there's something you need, it's the official behind that desk you have to deal with.
Officialdom is a pet project of the Dutch photographer Jan Banning, who has taken shots of bureaucrats in eight different countries, turning up unannounced so that there's no time for tidying or face-saving. His photos are taken as if from the perspective of a visiting citizen. Behind the desks are symbols of state power: flags, maps, calendars, presidential portraits. The desks themselves serve as barriers. "Thou shalt not pass" is the subtext. Whatever it is you want from these people, you're not going to get it.
Literary portraits of bureaucrats are rarely flattering: see Kafka, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Auden's poem The Fall of Rome ("an unimportant clerk/Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK/On a pink official form"). Banning's photos are more compassionate. It's impossible not to feel sorry for Sushma Prasad as she labours beneath heaps of documents in the state of Bihar in India. And though we can't see the expression on the face of Nadja Ali Gayt, working for the Ministry of Agriculture in Yemen doesn't look like fun.
The most intimidating apparatchiks are those behind polished desks in Russia, China and the US. Their stares are cold as steel and their paperwork is in horribly good order. A bungling bureaucrat is bad enough but an efficient one is truly scary.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/apr/18/photography
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