In 1985 Chauncey Hare donated his photographic archive to the Bancroft Library of the University of California. The condition is that any reproduction of him bears this caption: “These photographs were taken by Chauncey Hare to protest against the growing dominance of multinationals, their owners and managers over the workforce.”
His images, taken in the late 1950s and 1980s, tell the story of the American white middle class, those who work in the offices of large companies and live in suburbs, residential areas on the edge of the city. Among those bored employees there is also him, for twenty years at the desk of Standard Oil as a chemical engineer.
In this dual role, as subject and observer of the lives of others, Hare constructs a discourse that links art to politics, reflecting on the effects of capitalism on ordinary people. Despite three scholarships from the Guggenheim foundation, an exhibition at Moma and the publication of two monographs for Aperture (Interior America of 1978 and This was corporate America from 1984), the photographer prefers not to insert himself into the commercial logic of the art world and renounces success by preferring a career as a psychotherapist. In 1997 he wrote the book with Judith Wyatt Work abuse: how to recognize and survive it.
Although for Hare this path in medicine represents the antithesis of his previous artistic activity, it is evident how much he has investigated the same issues throughout his life. As Tim Adams recalls in the Guardian, by the New Yorker critic Janet Malcolm, as early as the seventies, his photos had been compared to the way in which a psychoanalyst works through free association; apparently trivial images but which seem to “tremble” for the charge of latent meanings, as if everything inside them represented something else.
Hare’s work, which remained forgotten after the success of the seventies, was recovered and deepened by the art historian Robert Sifkin in Quitting your day job (Mack), a critical biography that with essays and interviews shows how his photos can, even today, tell us about the pervasiveness of large companies in our daily life and the controversial relationship between art and power.