Invisible Workers
2020–2021
Invisible Workers is a photo-documentary series about the Poles who “built Norway”. With around 120,000 men, women and children, they are the country’s largest minority. Many arrived during Norway’s economic boom, found jobs in construction and built a large part of its cities.
Today, many of them live almost invisibly. Four men often share one or two small rooms in a basement or on the ground floor, sleeping in bunk beds. Clothes hang everywhere, and shoe racks and shelves are built by hand from wooden boxes. Left behind by the system, this working class is pushed to the edges of society.
For more than six months, I followed several older Polish men outside their working hours, in their flats, in parks and in cafés, and gave them space to tell their own stories. Some had been injured at work, fallen ill or struggled with addiction, partly because they never managed to integrate.
When they asked for help, practical obstacles kept them stuck. Most administration happens online and in Norwegian. Many had been pushed into undeclared work by Polish employers, so they had no right to sick pay and no guarantee of safety on heavy machinery. During the pandemic, many lost their jobs without compensation and could not risk travelling home to Poland.
Through portraits and their private spaces, I document their world with empathy and humour, and make visible a community that is easy to overlook.