“….rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.” So, ends the ancient English nursery rhyme and counting game that dates back to the 15th century. It was traditionally used by children as a fortune-telling song to predict what a child would grow up to be, or whom they would marry, by counting items like buttons on a coat or cherry stones on a plate. My, how times have changed.

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As I retired from my own career and took up a camera, I became more curious as to how others were earning their livings. Some by aspiration, some by choice, many by necessity. For 10 years, I collected images of Workers without any clear sense of where this was heading. I tended to be more curious about the manual jobs I knew least about. To me, officer workers were too familiar. I pounded the cities, towns and coasts in search of the visually distinctive. Whilst I hunted to feed specific Documentary or Street projects, I would come home with one or two Worker images that were outside the immediate interest of the project of the moment. I did not even store them in a folder – they were scattered amongst the many – lost in plain sight.