Kaleidoscope: Uniform Identities

Tuesday, July 24, 2012 | By: Ata Mohammad Adnan

While there is an identity associated with a uniform, somewhere down the line, the identity of the human being wearing the uniform gets lost. Men and women in uniform comprise a significant part of our society, but more often than not, the clothes they are required to wear render them invisible to passing crowds.

Many of these photographs were taken in the last six months, during my stay in Zhongshan, a small but emerging city in Guangdong Province. A few are from Guangzhou itself. For most of the images, I tried to communicate with my subjects through my broken Chinese; other times I used silence as my technique and waited for them to continue with their daily work while I photographed them.

These are the people who are behind a city’s rise and maintenance – the unsung heroes of the country. Photographing them is a long-term project, because this global phenomenon cannot be captured in a mere year or two.