People Cleaning Public Railings During the Pandemic疫情期间清洁栏杆的人们

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.

这组作品拍摄于新冠疫情暴发初期。当时，大量写字楼已经实行居家办公，我因返回公司取电脑而短暂外出。在几乎空荡的街道上，我看到一群清洁工人仍在反复擦拭道路两侧的公共栏杆。

疫情改变了人们与公共空间的关系。触摸、接近和停留都开始被视为潜在风险，栏杆这类日常设施也成为需要持续清洁和消毒的对象。当多数人可以退回室内时，清洁工人仍然需要留在街道上，通过重复而具体的身体劳动，维持城市最基础的公共卫生秩序。

我沿着栏杆拍摄正在工作的清洁工人，并将不同人物与动作拼接成长图。栏杆在画面中不断延伸，工人的身体也在擦拭、弯腰和行走之间重复出现。原本容易被忽略的劳动，由此成为图像中的主要事件。

作品发布后曾在社交媒体上被大量转发，并引发关于清洁工人和城市基础劳动的讨论。疫情使一些长期处于视线边缘的工作短暂地显现出来，也提醒我们，城市在危机中的持续运转，依赖许多日常、重复且很少被记录的劳动。