Idle Handcraft

Alireza Akbari Lor, ABSOLUTE, Photography - Series, 2020 Student Awards winner. 

2020 Student Awards winning photography series captures the disappearing world of handcrafting.

Ursula Franklin noted in her groundbreaking work The Real World of Technology (House of Anansi Press, 1992) that the computerized work place is a control-based workplace. With the advent of workstations linked to computers, the worker could be timed, their work portioned and monitored. In Franklin’s terminology this was prescriptive work.

In contrast, Franklin presented the artisan whose relationship to technology is holistic. The artisan is able to control their work from start to finish in the process of making a handcrafted product. Franklin argued that society’s turn to mass-production and prescriptive technologies and work was detrimental to humanity, in that, it promotes “a culture of compliance.”

In his 2020 Student Awards winning entry in the Photography category titled Absolute, Seneca College alumni Alireza Akbari Lor intimately captures the diminishing world of handcraft, or, in Franklin’s terms, holistic work. The photo series is filled with hand tools marked with the patina of hours of use, and the accumulation of organized clutter chaos that provides the textures of small shops.

As many of us shift to virtual workspaces where our pens need recharging rather than refilling, Lor’s work shines the shop light on the non-compliant outliers holding onto the holistic nature of handmade work.

Student Awards Deadline: May 21, 2021