Beyond the Factory Floor: How Photography Reveals the Hidden Landscapes of Women’s Labour

During my tenure as a curatorial research fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), I have spent months navigating the institution’s vast and storied collection of photographs. My initial objective was to locate images of people at work, a broad search that allowed me to traverse decades of visual history. However, as I moved through the archives, I found my attention repeatedly drawn to a specific subset of the collection: photographs of women working. This recurring focus was not merely a matter of personal curiosity; it became a deep-seated inquiry into how we define the very concept of the "workplace."

When we think of a workplace, our minds often gravitate toward a standardized, hyper-visible environment. We imagine settings clearly engineered for productivity: the soaring ceilings of a textile factory, the rigid architecture of an office, or the organized chaos of a workshop. These spaces—where the presence of machinery and the institutional arrangement of tools leave no ambiguity about what is occurring—were well-represented in the V&A collection. In many of these images, the context is undeniable; the industrial apparatus dictates the scene, framing the women within it as workers by default.

Yet, as I continued my research, I found that the reality of women’s labour, as captured by these photographers, was far from confined to these sanctioned, industrial zones. Their work was, and is, fluid. It spills over into the domestic sphere, the fields, the narrow arteries of city streets, and the vibrant clutter of local markets. These are spaces that are often dismissed as "everyday life," yet they serve as the primary theatre for an immense amount of human effort. This dichotomy—the stark, industrial workspace versus the nuanced, domestic, or public space—became the central pillar of my research. It forced me to move beyond a simple identification of labor and toward a more philosophical question: how do we actually identify work in a photograph?

The journey toward understanding this began with, and often returned to, images where the labour is not immediately signaled by a factory floor or an office desk. In many of these photographs, the work is hidden in plain sight, requiring the viewer to pause and engage in a more active process of observation. Upon closer inspection, the "work" reveals itself through subtle, human cues: the specific tension in a hand’s position, the deliberate lean of a body, the presence of a humble tool, or the rhythmic exchange between two people in front of the lens.

Émile Fréchon’s Elderly woman weaving, captured around 1900, stands as a quintessential example of this quiet, persistent labour. When you first encounter the image, there is no grand machinery to anchor the scene. The woman is not positioned in an industrial facility; she is, presumably, in a domestic or semi-domestic setting. Because the setting is so ordinary, the viewer is invited to look more slowly and more closely. We are guided by the woman’s posture and the material draped in her lap. Her hands are the focal point, serving as the bridge between her intention and the finished textile. There is a profound sense of skill and concentration here that exists independent of a formal workspace. The work is not separated from her daily existence; it is seamlessly integrated into it. It reminds us that for generations, women’s labour has been categorized by this blending of the personal and the professional.

A similar narrative thread appears in George Bunzl’s Mexico – Girl Spinning, taken around 1965. Like the weaving in the Fréchon photograph, the act of spinning is defined by small, iterative movements. These gestures—looping, pulling, twisting—are repeated so frequently that they can easily fade into the background of our visual perception. We are often trained to admire the finished object—the sweater, the rug, or the tapestry—while the human process behind it remains largely invisible. A photograph acts as a corrective lens, pulling our focus away from the commodity and back to the person, the gesture, and the time-intensive process that brought the object into being.

This theme of the workplace as a fluid, rather than fixed, concept continues when we look at the outdoors. In another piece by Fréchon, Two women dig up potatoes, possibly in the Pas de Calais, the field itself is transformed into the factory. Their bent backs and the angle of their bodies toward the earth speak to the physical toll of agricultural labour. There is no doubt about what they are doing, yet the "workplace" here is vast, open, and subject to the elements. The labour is recognized not by the infrastructure of the space, but by the physical exertion of the workers.

As I shifted my research toward public spaces, I encountered Pamela Bone’s Flower Seller Udaipur, documented between 1981 and 1992. This image complicates our understanding of the workplace through the lens of social interaction. Here, the work is an encounter. The title provides a label, but the visual evidence of that labour is found in the connection between two figures. They lean toward one another, their hands meeting in the center of the frame, surrounded by the delicate materials of their trade. The workplace here is ephemeral; it is created by the exchange and then potentially dissolves as the transaction ends. It highlights how much of the world’s economic activity, particularly in public markets, relies on these fleeting, human-centric moments rather than static, predefined locations.

In contrast, Eric Freeborn’s Women at work in a factory (c. 1937–38) offers a jarring, yet necessary, counterpoint to these domestic and public scenes. In this image, the machinery is the protagonist. It commands the space, dwarfing the human element and dictating the rhythm of the workers. There is no ambiguity here; the environment itself serves as an advertisement for the industrial nature of the task. It is a powerful reminder that while much of women’s work has historically occurred in quiet, overlooked spaces, there is a parallel, equally significant history of women operating within the heavy, loud, and clearly defined industrial landscapes of the modern age.

Reflecting on these images as a collection, I have come to realize that the visual representation of work is a spectrum. On one end, we have the factory, where the machine dictates the recognition of labour. On the other, we have the spindle, the field, and the market stall, where the viewer must be an active participant in decoding the action. These photographs do not merely document women at work; they challenge us to recognize the many different forms that labour can take.

The minute details—the way a finger grips a tool, the posture of a tired back, the look of focused attention in an exchange—convey information about the nature of work long before we ever read a caption. They serve as a vital reminder that work does not always require a "workplace" in the traditional, architectural sense. Sometimes, it sits quietly within the domestic routine, invisible to the casual observer, yet essential to the fabric of daily life.

My time at the V&A has taught me that the most interesting aspect of these images is not just the act of finding "women at work," but the process of noticing how that work becomes visible—or how it remains hidden. By examining these diverse visual narratives, we are forced to re-examine our own definitions of labor. We see that work is not just a destination or a set of industrial requirements; it is a human activity that shapes and is shaped by the spaces we inhabit. These photographs are not just historical records; they are calls to pay closer attention to the labor that quietly fuels our world, whether it happens in a sprawling factory or in the simple, deliberate movements of a hand at work in a home.