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Abstract
This paper reflects on the potential value of art photography as a means of critically interrogating the relationship between organisation and abjection. Inspired by Adorno’s (Citation1997) understanding of art as a non‐conceptual mode of communication and Kristeva’s (Citation1982) concept of the abject, we consider the work of several contemporary photographic artists, who have specifically chosen the subject of work organisations in their images. We do so in an attempt to illustrate our argument that art photography shares a capacity with other art forms to reveal, in an immediate and powerful manner, that which is formally excluded from traditional modes of organisational analysis and those discourses that surround and support it.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
An earlier version of this paper was presented in the ‘Photo and Visual Images’ stream at The 2nd Art of Management and Organisation Conference, Paris 2004. We would like to thank the stream conveners and participants, as well as the two anonymous reviewers of this revised version, for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions. We would also like to acknowledge and thank The Photographers’ Gallery, London for kindly granting us permission to reproduce the images in Figures –.
