Werker Collective

Werker Collective A.K.A Werker is a long-term multifaceted project about photography and labour initiated by Marc Roig Blesa and Rogier Delfos in Amsterdam in 2009. The collective started as an editorial project releasing ten issues of a contextual publication called Werker Magazine.

Its starting point is the worker photography movement, a group of associations of amateur photographers that appeared in germany in the 1920’s, following in the steps of the first socialist photography experiments in the USSR which extended into the rest of Europe, the United States, and Japan. It takes an interest in working methodologies based on counter-archiving, self-representation, self-publishing, image analysis, and collective learning processes.

Werker aims to expand the notion of self-publishing into a variety of media such as moving image, digital publishing, installation, printed matter and performance. Werker operates contextual, thus exploring different forms and strategies of interaction with a variety of audiences. Through several projects, in the last ten years, werker has created an international community of allies, exploring notions of collective authorship, queerness, reactivating oppressed histories and worker’s solidarity.