Ian Beesley- Through the Mill (Theme-Work) Photo Analysis

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I started to research work photography on google images and I came across a photographer called Ian Beesley, who took the photograph shown above. The photograph has been published as part of the book called, 'Through the Mill' which is a story on Yorkshire Wool in Photographs.

This photograph is depicting the working woman in the Yorkshire Wool Factory in 1987. What caught my eye about this image was the composition of it because everything seems so neat and symmetrical. You can clearly see that the woman in the photograph are hardworking due to the fact that they look busy and you can see the different movement in the photograph showing that they are not just standing around doing nothing.

You can tell that this is quite an old photo due to the details of not having any kind of safety wear or equipment while completing their work. For example, in nowadays you would most probably see workers wear hair nets etc. whereas, in the photograph above, they just have their hair either up or down, there's no safety to prevent their hair getting caught in the machinery for example.

I would imagine that all the photographs including this one in the book were shot black and white because colour photography was not as popular around those years, but also it makes the photographs a little more dramatic and enhances the details within them. You can pretty much see every little detail of the machinery that is being used if you look closely enough.

This photograph relates to the theme of the week which is 'work' because it is clearly depicting people specifically woman at work being very productive and working very hard to produce wool. In addition, they are shown in their own working environment to show what it is like working for a wool factory or at least what it used to be like working for it back in the days.

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