People Cleaning Public Railings During the Pandemic

This work was photographed during the early outbreak of COVID-19. At the time, many offices had shifted to remote work, and I had briefly left home to collect a computer from my workplace. On the nearly empty streets, I encountered a group of sanitation workers repeatedly wiping down the public railings along the road.

The pandemic transformed people’s relationship with public space. Touch, proximity, and physical contact became associated with potential risk, while ordinary urban fixtures such as railings required continuous cleaning and disinfection. While many people were able to withdraw indoors, sanitation workers remained on the streets, maintaining basic public hygiene through repetitive and physically demanding labour.

I photographed the workers along the length of the railings and combined their movements into an elongated image. The railing extends continuously across the composition, while bodies recur through gestures of wiping, bending, walking, and reaching. Labour that would ordinarily remain peripheral becomes the central event of the image.

After its publication, the work circulated widely on social media and prompted discussion about sanitation workers and essential urban labour. The pandemic temporarily brought greater visibility to forms of work that had long remained at the margins of public attention. The series reflects on how the continuity of the city during a period of crisis depended upon ordinary, repetitive, and rarely documented acts of labour.