kill. all. grups.
Friday, March 31, 2006
We’ve lived it for years, but evidently it’s big news in New York that creativity, quality of life and a post-slacker fashion sense can coexist amiably with child-rearing and profitable entrepreneurship in contemporary urban America.
Adam Sternbergh’s recent cover story for New York magazine describes boroughs populated by people in their 30s and 40s who have grown up and produced offspring, but who have also failed to grow into their parents’ norms for work, child-rearing and recreation. In short, they (we?) wear frayed jeans and carry messenger bags, love those secular musical genres that the cool kids are into these days, and refresh themselves (ourselves?) by bringing the family along whilst gigging, snowboarding, hanging around in bars or traveling to music festivals.
Although Sternbergh’s narrative strategy primarily tends to make an appeal to the good old fashioned gloss of high disposable incomes, and to play on the insecurities of a post-yuppie audience of strivers, his writing does call attention to a significant way in which the visual semiotics of work is changing in contemporary culture.
And visual change is a topic of acute interest to FogStock and agencies like ours. In the past, the generational image of work would have been set on a farm, then in a factory, and then in an office. But now the visual markers of post-industrial labor are not just changing, they are being seamlessly assimilated with the visual markers of post-industrial leisure.
For stock photography, the notion that one could plant a suit in a picture and call it a contemporary business image has been an enduring cliché, but those days might be drawing to a close. If the scholars and public policy makers who advocate new urban economies based on promotion of the Creative Class are correct, then the semiotics of post-industrial labor will increasingly resemble home, family and play. Right?
posted by fogged @ 10:06 AM
