Why Morgan Levy’s Spark of a Nail Is One of the Most Important Photography Exhibitions on Labor Today

Spark of a Nail Morgan Levy’s exhibition at BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York captures detail in the individual and acts of release within the constructed imagery. Throughout every image within Morgan Levy’s exhibition the group/ crew mentality of focusing on working on a task is not the main focus. The individual works alone in many of these images. Isolated, until moments incorporating a balance of emotion and act of relief.

After initially viewing the exhibition; and speaking with Morgan the rhythm of construction sites became impossible to ignore. The same site locations shift drastically depending on the time. Interestingly the moments that stood were early mornings prior to a horn signaling the day’s labor, late nights after the crew has left, and rain-soaked afternoons filled with downpour or snow and work pauses. These in-between moments generate a temporal ambiguity in Levy’s photographs where labor is implied through absence rather than spectacle.

The silence without the workers is noticeable, but easily overlooked within such a large city where everything is naturally loud. That silence mirrors the unnoticed demographics that contradict the dominant perception of a construction worker. With only 2% of women within maintenance and repair roles and 4.1% in construction and extraction roles the gallery feels as if it was an empty construction site — a space defined not by what is present, but by who is missing. The same feeling emerges late at night or early morning before the crew arrives — imperceptible, yet present.

Release as Humanization: Exhaustion

Internally you can feel the placidity, coursing through the contrast of these monochrome stills. Thirty-nine Moved by Hand, displays a person bent over, face laid on a stack of cinderblocks upheld by a wooden pallet with the phrase “Bricks Only” displayed on it. When debating an image’s clarity and trying to understand its context I seek the abstract. Why in plain sight does a stack of cinderblocks have a sign that says “Bricks Only”?

Morgan responded: “I love that you notice that detail. It always makes me chuckle a little bit. (……..) And this is a photo that I don’t like to give too much away about. (..) What I can say is that this picture was made in Seattle with an organization that has a pre-apprenticeship program for women and non-binary individuals. And they’re essentially, in a pre-apprenticeship program, skilling up. They’re for people who, for many different reasons, have not acquired sort of the basic level skills that one would need to start actually progressing forward in a specified trade.

One of the things they do in these pre-apprenticeship programs is they help individuals literally physically build their body up. And so they have endurance tests. One of the endurance tests is having to actually move 39 cinder blocks from one palette to another. I’d say many feet away.

And so this image comes out of having observed that, actually having participated in one of those so that I could understand what they were going through.

To be clear, I participated in a wheelbarrow endurance test.”

Achromatic Placidity

“Black and white was actually an important decision for gaining more information in this work. And what I mean by that is that when I first started making the work and I was making pictures in color, because I was photographing digitally, (…) I realized that many of these individuals are wearing high visibility clothing, which they wear for safety reasons. But when photographed, effectively renders them invisible as individuals. And that was counter to what my intentions were. And so part of this act of transformation was actually ensuring that as viewers, we can see the people in the photographs.”

Achromatic fluidity throughout the artworks directs the viewer to become inquisitive, the ambiguity of time, location and lack of color, and therefore lack of distraction create an ambiance that focuses on intention.

Morgan’s direct impact through her use of shades rather than color adds an emphasis upon intention.