Artist Statement
IMPACTED explores the dystopian environment of workplaces during severe downturns and resulting layoffs. This work is grounded in my personal perspective as an employee at Nortel Networks in Ottawa as it went through bankruptcy. The book creates a portrait of friends and colleagues who were laid off (“impacted” in the vernacular of the time) through photographs of the personal artifacts left behind as ever-present ghostly traces of their presence in the spaces they once occupied. The work is also a reflection of my 30+ year career in the technology industry navigating through three corporate bankruptcies while avoiding being part of the many ‘reductions in force’, left with my remaining co-workers to toil away in the liminal environments that remained.
During the mass layoffs, some offices were partially cleared out, with the most personal items quickly gathered up during the co-worker’s exit. Others departed clouded in a range of emotions (frustration, anger, uncertainty for the future, etc.) leaving behind cubicles that appear as if they had just stepped away for lunch. The abysmal treatment of employees is reflected in these empty spaces. Their further depersonalization is exemplified by image titling using the physical cubicle numbers that they were reduced to during the process. The photographs are interspersed with text snippets from internal emails documenting the multi-year process of Nortel’s implosion, providing a personal experience from within.
While reviewing and sequencing the images for the book, I encountered a different perspective that I hadn’t considered while originally making the photographs. At one point there were just a handful of us occupying a physical office floor designed to accommodate hundreds. Those of us who survived the downturn were also ‘impacted’ by the experience. We continued on in isolation with varying degrees of survivor guilt, sadness, fear and uncertainty.
IMPACTED spans a narrative from the first image of the soaring architecture capturing limitless opportunities built at the peak of the technology industry, to the ultimate demise, depicted by the final image of the destruction of the monolithic Nortel sign in front of the Ottawa main campus after the bankruptcy and sale of all assets. Employees with disabilities, pensions and outstanding severance, received only a fraction of what was due.
Although the original photographic work was done in 2010, the story continues to repeat and resonate today - not only in technology industries but throughout workplaces where costs and shareholder value combine with leadership hubris to prevail over the lives and well-being of employees.