Innocent Worker.
Cog in the Machine.
Innocent Worker
INNOCENTWORKER.
INNOCENTWORKER.
One day in 2024, I had what some would call a vision of sorts. I don’t know where these sorts of mental sights come from, but I believe it came from God. I don’t know where else. I do remember it just came into my mind, just floated in piece by piece. I kept seeing a person wearing a oversized formal attire. They were burdened and heavy.
Their demeanor and countenance was filled with…high character and high expression, but the expression was a look of probably lifelessness, or numbness maybe is a better word to use. Kind of like a mime at SeaWorld or something like that, as far as expressions go.
But said animation isn’t present much in the face.
And sometimes it was just a lot of whimsy.
“I just was seeing this one day, and I was like what does it mean?”
I was seeing this one day, and I was like what does it mean? I just kind of started writing some stuff down. I don’t know, this was something that I felt like I needed to do something about. I wanted to do a photoshoot, and I started getting excited.
I started getting that feeling, that itch, where I’m like, “Oh man! I could see this looking like this, or like that,”. The more I thought about it, the more I wrote some stuff down and jotted ideas out. I just started creating this internal world of what it looked like.
I did my best to kind of put it to life– as you can see here – what the world looked like inside of my head was a space that was an office of sorts or some sort of workplace, one that had random supplies left and right that maybe said person collected over time.
coginthemachine.
I saw this being a woman, and particularly a woman.
I saw that this person had an innocent, pure face. They didn’t seem to really want to be doing this work that they were doing. So, I ran with it being a woman maybe in corporate or a family business. The character doesn’t feel at all like themselves, doesn’t feel like they’re thriving, but they’re doing it pretty darn well.
My friend Akasha, heard the idea, and sincerely resonated with this. We were both geeking about creating something like this together and truly were like two kids wanting to put our hands in paint and make handprints on a blank canvas.
This concept came to me in the summer of 2024, it is the summer of 2026 now, and here we are. I’m one of those guys that sort of believes in this whole connective creative consciousness theory that’s been floating around. I’m honored to have had a little idea that, after so much time of interruptions, life hurdles, and priorities rising higher on the list (like purchasing our first home), fall into fruition. The two of us “phone tagged” for a very long time with our calendars matching up.
Not sure if you can relate to this, but I tend to let many of my ideas sit on the shelf for way too long like Wheezy from Toy Story. Sadly, some have gone 5-7 years of never getting done, attempted, or finalized. So, it feels so good…so, so good…to see something that came to me, actually get photographed. I feel honored. I feel accomplished. I feel humbled.
Life has been truthfully kicking my ass over the last few years, so this shoot fed something in my creative soul that many other things haven’t fulfilled. Just to paint a picture for you, I cried in the middle of photographing my good friend Akasha here.
So…that is kind of the idea of Innocent Worker: Cog in the Machine. Hope the pictures speak more than this blog.
GC
