‘DO NOT TURN THIS MACHINE OFF’ warns a yellow label affixed to a computer. The monitor is one of many, seemingly piles and piles, one side of which are potentially dead, with pink post-it notes stamped to their screens, and the other very much alive, all aglow with streaming data. Photographed at a stockbrokers’ office in New York in 1997, at the scene’s centre, a tight corridor of cables gives way to a small American flag, a gentleman in a shirt and tie just visible above.
‘It's not very common that photographers go for that boring environment,’ says Greger Ulf Nilson, reflecting on the wider context of the photograph, the office. ‘There is a few, of course – Anna Fox did a book called Work Stations, then there is Lee Friedlander’s At Work. But just boring offices, not that many have documented that.'
