The Lonely Office Worker: A 1990s Retrospective

“I would say to them, ‘Just do whatever you normally do, and I’m going to watch and take some pictures,. I would just sit and just watch.”

– The Office by Steven Ahlgren

 

Between the neon lights and nylon carpets tiles, office life can be lifeless. The life of an office worker is captured in a series of photographs by Steven Ahlgren.

The American artist was working in a Minneapolis bank in 1987, when he began making frequent trips to look at Edward Hooper’s 1940 painting, Office at Night at the Walker Art Center. In the scene, a man is sat at his desk reading. A woman is stood nearby.

 

 

“I had been working in an office since 1984 and I was growing a little disenchanted with it,” says Ahlgren. “I was struck by the Hopper painting – oh my gosh, look at this. Here’s a scene in an office where I am every day that seems so pedestrian. I kept coming back to it because, like so many of his paintings, it lets you make up your own story. I was trying to figure it out but I never really resolved in my mind what was happening there… What I got from it was this idea that you could have a very plain, pedestrian, everyday situation – and it’s hard to think of anything more like that than the average office – and make it something dramatic. To fill the narrative tension in some way.”

As Hopper himself put it:

“The picture was probably first suggested by many rides on the L train in New York City after dark, and glimpses of office interiors that were so fleeting as to leave fresh and vivid impressions on my mind. My aim was to give the sense of an isolated and lonely office interior rather high in the air.”

 

 

Ahlgren saw the opportunity and secured permission to take pictures.

“One of the first pictures I made in the series was a guy making photocopies,” Ahlgren says of the picture at the top of this page. “I was in the coffee room when the guy came in. He was there for a while making copies, and when I saw this scene – it was as close to a self-portrait as I had ever made because surely I had looked exactly like that when I was at the bank, lost in my thoughts and wondering how long was I going to stay there? What was I going to do?”

 

 

“My wife works in a law firm and she has to deal with a culture that’s heavily like that. My older daughter is a mechanical engineering student and she’s sometimes one of the only women in the room. It resonates with me because I’ve never had that situation of being the only man in the room – except when my daughters were born and I was the stay-at-home parents. I was the only father in the playgroup.”

– Steven Ahlgren

 

 

“I had some bitterness from the years I spent in banking, and I felt it was wasted time,. So, when I started I thought, ‘Here are people wasting their lives, just like I was.’ But then I began to really empathize with them. They may have loved their work.”

– Steven Ahlgren

 

 

 

Via The Office by Steven Ahlgren, published by Hoxton Mini Press.