The Desire for Dirty Hands
August Sander; Young Farmers, 1914. Photo taken from Here We have been removed over the generations from the land, and particularly from the everyday activity of getting our hands dirty. In the cities, there is less and less land to get to grips with, and the constraints capitalism puts on the populace at large to earn their rights to life through currency rather than through connection with natural resources has, over history, forced most to work in factories and industry. In rural areas, technological leaps in machinery and practice has meant agriculture needs fewer workers. Industry in rural areas has thus become more abstracted; I often think of those strange, lonely industrial estates blighting the landscape in the middle of nowhere. Even if you wanted to grapple with the land, the rights and ownership in the UK has become ever more restricting and dense; we have an incredibly unequal distribution of land, with half of it being owned by less than 1% of the population. When I