Jan Banning
Jan Banning is a Dutch photographer whose work often explores state power, bureaucracy, and inequality. In Bureaucratics, he photographs civil servants in their working environments across different countries, comparing bureaucratic systems in places such as Bolivia, China, France, India, Liberia, Russia, the United States, and Yemen. The portraits are all made in a similar way, which shifts the focus not only to the individual, but also to the uniform structures of power and administration that appear across contexts.
What draws me to this project is the combination of documentary imagery and a nearly typological, systematic approach. By photographing all subjects in a similar manner, bureaucracy is revealed as a kind of universal “setting” in which people operate, regardless of country or context. It makes the often invisible structures of power and administration suddenly very concrete and visual.