The title of my project is “The Hands that Shape Our World.” I have developed my own individual approach to this title by focusing on capturing workers engaged in everyday overlooked tasks—railway maintenance, sidewalk tiling, and building facade repair. Each image complements the others by showing varied settings and methods.

The artists who have inspired my work the most are Sebastião Salgado and Edward Burtynsky. Salgado’s humanistic close-ups inspire my focus on the workers as the central subject, highlighting their efforts and care. Burtynsky’s large-scale industrial compositions influence my choice of photography to show the environment and tools as an essential part of the story.

In order to develop my ideas for this project, I have experimented with different perspectives—for example, the ground-level shot along the railway, the closer shots of hands and tools in tiling, and the elevated viewpoints of workers on the platform. I controlled the lighting to balance natural daylight and shadow while maintaining small details.

I chose to align these three photos like this because I wanted each photo to stand alone, yet work as part of a unified narrative storytelling of manual labor and its impact on our labor life.

Overall, the strengths of the project are my successful use of composition and lighting to highlight the human presence and tools in each daily task and the complementary nature of the images, which deepens the viewer’s understanding of the theme.

The areas that I will need to work on in future projects are expanding the narrative with more contextual or environmental shots and experimenting with creative shots to add mood without losing realism.

I believe I have successfully explored the theme of urban labor because each photo captures distinct tasks with skilled workers, diverse tools, and different spatial relations. The naturalistic color palette of warm color combinations and detailed framing unifies the series.

My decisions about how to display it included choosing a side-by-side triptych format to visually link the images while allowing viewers to appreciate each scene’s unique story.

What is personal about my work is my curiosity about the unseen, often uncelebrated efforts people make to build and maintain our everyday urban spaces. I hope viewers will understand the skill, dedication, and value of this labor through these images.

If I had more time, I would have liked to add environmental portraits and wider shots showing more of the workers’ surroundings and possibly capture different times of day or conditions to add narrative depth.