Dehumanization

Dehumanization is a concept that defines the act of denying someone humanness. Scholars propose two forms of dehumanization: perceiving humans as animals or as objects.

The most evident domains of dehumanization are the ones relating to ethnicity, race and gender. However, the concept of dehumanization is much broader.

Dehumanization in the workplace is a reality which is continuously expanding through the advances of technology. It starts even before arriving at the workplace. Employers are gradually using more recruiting software to screen candidates. Before a potential employee actual meets a human person from the company they will have to go through online registrations and surveys which are aimed to more easily put aside undesired candidates. The potential employee is perceived solely as a set of preestablished desired attributes - their humanness is being denied, they're being perceived as objects.

Dehumanization will then continue to be applied in the actual workplace.

Employees are seen as machines, their levels of efficiency and their performance must be regular and constant at all times. Employees are thus perceived as automaton-like and expected to lack emotions and spontaneity.

Another growing practice is outsourcing, that is, to relocate jobs in another labor market. This is one ingredient for dehumanization. Companies choose to relocate in countries in which labor is cheaper, recruit in big numbers from economically weak countries with high unemployment rates and use them as automatons, aiming at increasing productivity and, more importantly, profit.

This photographic project comes from a personal encounter with dehumanization at my work place. With it I aimed to portrait the individuality of these workers, which like me, were being perceived as machines and numbers.

I invited them to the studio, where we could be spontaneous, to show emotions, to be unique, to be human.

The result is a small series of black and white 35mm pictures which, by being collected here, is meant to honor humanity, not as a group of people, but as a the quality of being humane and to make a small contribution to a topic which I feel is important nowadays.