I began to write on the thread about worker pics on the main board, then realized that much of this was going to be "worker experience," so, a copy and paste later, and here I am in
Coffee Talk.
I've found this thread to be very interesting, and it has made me rethink my own feelings about worker pictures. I've had a very negative view of them in the past few years, maybe focused on the feeling we were doing something wrong when we took the worker pictures down a few years ago, as numerous ones of those workers became personally hurtful to us. Thus, I immediately agreed with the "shrine" depiction . . .
However, though I certainly still empathize with the feeling expressed in that, and feel it has a validity, it is evident too - both through these threads and through considering my own experience - that the photos are used in different ways by various people.
One aspect that might be interesting to consider is the circulation of the photos - in my experience, soon after the California and Hawai`i conventions, "orders" would be taken for reprints, sometimes with a couple of size variations being offered. Not a good or bad thing, but it does to me indicate a certain value (not monetary!) attached to the photos. I have also had numerous "worker pictures" - as in the group shots taken at various conventions and worker meetings - sent to me, both while I was in the work and later. I held on to them, sort of in an unthinking feeling of obligation - again, something in which I felt I was crossing a barrier in finally removing them from our stacks of pics and tossing them. Then there were some large collections maintained by a certain couple in California (the same people who took the worker pics at Santee for years). These were kept in binders, and were very nice individual and small-group (i.e. companions, those who had worked in a specific region like the islands, come from a certain area, etc.) for the friends to purchase. I'm not being "critical" of these - I'm just saying they were there, as something people did, with different values and meanings for different people.
Then there's the display of the photos - my general impression is that the worker meeting group shots were often given a place of importance in a home. Here in Hawai`i, we would have a photo of the somewhat small group of workers at the convention, but also an often-larger print of the California worker meeting group photo. And though I don't remember specifically checking to see if homes had any (I didn't check homes for much of anything except good books to read!), I do feel I had sort of a general impression upon seeing one of these photos prominently displayed that "things were in order" in that home. That wasn't my entire gauge of a home or people, of course, but I believe it did play a role.
Another display type was the desktop with numerous worker pictures in them. This was really not that common in my experience, and it seemed to be in the homes of people who were quite involved with workers in some way - convention grounds owners, meeting homes, homes the workers used for their mail, etc. I'm sure there was a love for the workers by these people, but this kind of display also narrates a story - "We're involved with the workers; we do a lot for the workers." It can - and perhaps unintentionally - create competition.
And of course there are numerous worker photos on various shelves, tables, walls, etc. And these have their different connections with people too - some of specific individuals who have meant a lot in someone's experience, others seem to be collections of as many worker pictures as they can fit in there.
One thing I was aware of in the work is that certain workers tended to have their photos all over the state - they were more "popular" - sometimes because of personality, at other times because of theirs and the particular friends' involvement in something like the Mexico work (a big thing in California). It is easy to say this shouldn't exist, and that a not-so-popular worker shouldn't let it bother them. But it is there. And when you're struggling to live according to what you see as right, but others seem to get much more attention because of personality, it does not go unnoticed.
For me, the photos, like most of what we do, are creating narratives of our lives. It may be a story saying, "This is someone who helped us in our lives, and I love him/her for it. It can also be a story saying, "look at how much I do for 'the kingdom.'"
This might be a bit of an aside here, but I became very "attached" to a sister worker close to my age quite a number of years ago. This was through lots of talking only! I finally realized, during one preps/convention season, that I really had feelings for her. A good friend (and former worker) made sure I came to his home after conventions, and kindly let me know that I had a choice to make, and that the feeling was not mutual either. Other workers had already gone through this with her. At his advice, I never wrote her another letter, never had more than a very basic, "Hello. How you doing?" conversation. The connection with worker photos? That year, I was in a field where she had been not too many years prior, and her picture was all over the place! I memorized each spot in order to avoid them! Another worker angle you may find interesting . . . you might see in these things that workers attach meanings to some photos too, and not necessarily the same meanings the friends are attaching to them.