Philippe Chancel - Workers

Philippe Chancel reveals us the existence of the thousands of workers in United Arab Emirates who toil constantly constructing amazing cities: Dubai, Abu-Dhabi, with his book Workers....

Such city states are fueled by imagination, dreams, luxury commerce, beaches, sumptious museums, malls without end where all brands can be found.... artificial universes where the unreal may have more reality than the real. But this dream has another side, the world of the manual workers who build it. Unregistered and annonimous Filipinos and Chinese cross this stage, and Philippe Chancel catches them as they work. He shows us their lives, labouring under the sun, turbaned with pieces of fabric, wearing hats or scarfs to protect themselves from the heat and dust. We are able to observe up-close these workers who have agreed to do this work despite the difficult working-conditions.

For the special edition, Philippe Chancel choosed 10 different Workers' portraits print in 3 copies each in a large size (60 x 80 cm) on Hahnemühle art paper 308g. Each photography is signed & numbered to the back. One copie of the book "Workers" is given free for each order of a limited photography print.

Bilingual text (French/English) by Damien Sausset.


BIOGRAPHY
For more than twenty years Philippe Chancel has been developing a photographic experiment in a fertile, complex, and rapidly advancing field between art, documentary and journalism. His work has been widely shown, and published in France and overseas in leading magazines. "DPRK", his vision of North Korea, was shown for the first time in the Rencontres d'Arles ( 2006), followed by other international exhibitions (Berlin, London). His "Emirates project" was presented to the 53rd Bienniale de Venise (Abu Dhabi pavilion). At the end of 2009, Philippe published Desert Spirit (Xavier Barral editions). His work is present in numerous private collections, as well as in the Société Générale collection, the Deutsche Bank collection, the City of Lyon and the National collection of contempory art.