Life, Inc.
The corporation is one of mans most abstract achievements. Products became brands, owners became shareholders and stockmarkets and financial services became the worlds leading businesses. With this came the office building. These concrete geometrical shapes reaching for the sky seem as much at odds with the human being as the businesses in these buildings. They are the physical representation of a completely unphysical entity.
While these concrete jungles breathe efficiency and purpose, on a human level they seem cold, abstract and empty. When a person does make an appearance, unprotected by car or public transportation unit, they seem out of place, isolated.
Karl Marx said that in a capitalistic world, human goals are replaced by ideas of profit and personal succes. With values & ideas not their own, people become alienated.
Life, Inc. shows this human alienation; the images create a cognitive dissonance, mixing the strange beauty of a concrete, geometrical world with the pressing feeling of emptiness and isolation.
Photos have been taken in Dubai and Sharjah, both part of the UAE.
Job Jonathan Schlingemann, The Netherlands
www.schlingemann.nl
