The Bureaucrats
They keep tabs, push papers and uphold the letter of the law. Meet the bureaucrats keeping the world in order.
Photographer Jan Banning
Caption Writer Will Tinnemans
How do you photograph something as amorphous as ‘the state’? That was the question photographer Jan Banning found himself asking when he was sent to Mozambique on an unusual job. His editor had asked him to capture “the decentralisation of the administration of development aid” with his camera. “How are you meant to shoot that?” Banning remembers thinking.
The obvious answer would be to snap a few portraits of ministers and aid officials seated at grand mahogany desks, fountain pens and leather binders in hand. But the obvious never held much sway with the 63-year-old Dutchman. “I like to focus on the unspectacular, to see what’s beneath the surface,” he explains. In this case, that meant photographing the individual bureaucrats being decentralised, whom Banning came to see as the “shop windows of the state.”
The project quickly took on a life of its own. Banning teamed up with a writer named Will Tinnemans and embarked on a paper-pushing tour of the world, visiting hundreds of government offices across eight countries. Each place was selected as a point of comparison. “I chose the U.S. because it is – or was when I started – the global superpower; India because it’s the world’s biggest democracy; Russia because it had changed from communism to neoliberalism; Liberia because it has gone through a civil war, and that makes you curious about how they have re-established the state.”
The project quickly took on a life of its own. Banning teamed up with a writer named Will Tinnemans and embarked on a paper-pushing tour of the world, visiting hundreds of government offices across eight countries. Each place was selected as a point of comparison. “I chose the U.S. because it is – or was when I started – the global superpower; India because it’s the world’s biggest democracy; Russia because it had changed from communism to neoliberalism; Liberia because it has gone through a civil war, and that makes you curious about how they have re-established the state.”
The project quickly took on a life of its own. Banning teamed up with a writer named Will Tinnemans and embarked on a paper-pushing tour of the world, visiting hundreds of government offices across eight countries. Each place was selected as a point of comparison. “I chose the U.S. because it is – or was when I started – the global superpower; India because it’s the world’s biggest democracy; Russia because it had changed from communism to neoliberalism; Liberia because it has gone through a civil war, and that makes you curious about how they have re-established the state.”
The project quickly took on a life of its own. Banning teamed up with a writer named Will Tinnemans and embarked on a paper-pushing tour of the world, visiting hundreds of government offices across eight countries. Each place was selected as a point of comparison. “I chose the U.S. because it is – or was when I started – the global superpower; India because it’s the world’s biggest democracy; Russia because it had changed from communism to neoliberalism; Liberia because it has gone through a civil war, and that makes you curious about how they have re-established the state.”
To capture the offices the way an ordinary citizen would see them, their visits were unannounced. If a bureaucrat tried to tidy their desk, Tinnemans would distract them with interview questions while Banning set up the shot. He followed a simple formula for composing each photo. “I shot in a square format, which is the most boring format you can use. It’s a metaphor for the strict system of rules and regulations behind bureaucracy.”
The result is Bureaucratics, a collection of 50 photos comparing the culture, rituals and symbols of state administrations. Accompanying each picture is a caption detailing the bureaucrat’s role, salary and any other facts Tinnemans found interesting. Most are banal, while others are tinged with more human elements – stories of hardship told through statistics. But while many of the bureaucrats confessed to finding their jobs boring, it was Banning they felt sorry for. “The way they saw it, a successful photographer should be out photographing ladies in bikinis on the beach. But bureaucrats? I must have been a real loser.”