Bureaucratics is the result of a collaboration between an anarchist’s heart, an artist’s eye and a historian’s mind.
Portraying Pen Pushers
Bureaucratics is a comparative photographic study of the culture and symbols of bureaucracy, originally in eight countries across five continents. In this new edition, titled Bureaucratics Revisited, the number of countries has been extended to twelve. For writer Will Tinnemans and me, bureaucracy refers to those unelected, appointed officials of the executive branch tasked with implementing laws and other government policies – including police officers. In Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society, 1922), renowned sociologist Max Weber describes the bureaucratic apparatus as a rationalized system of administration, characterized by hierarchy, formal rules and an impersonal approach. He argues that bureaucracies should treat citizens impartially to ensure fairness and equality. But he also notes that this same impersonality confronts citizens with objective criteria, protocols and procedures, and that this can lead to rigidity, dehumanization and alienation. This bureaucratic rationalization can easily result in failure to take individual needs into account.
Civil service offices are, on the one hand, display windows of the state: places where the government presents itself to its citizens, using symbols and paraphernalia that express the authority and legitimacy of the state and the associated political system: items such as files; desks behind which officials appear pinned down; framed portraits, certificates and other images that emphasize the officials’ relationship to the state. On the other hand, however, these offices are also a kind of individual or communal living space for those who spend a significant portion of their time in them – working or not. We immediately ruled out countries where citizens were received only at impersonal counters.
Countries
The original book Bureaucratics was edited by British photographer Martin Parr, published in 2008 by Nazraeli, and had four print runs – all sold out long ago. It contained 50 photos from eight countries, made between 2003 and 2007.
Tinnemans and I originally selected eight countries on five continents based on political, historical, and cultural considerations. Each country chosen had to refer to a broader concept: the world’s most populous democracy (India); the decaying, the present and the upcoming great power (Russia, the USA and China); the South American country with the highest percentage of indigenous people (Bolivia): an African country with a past of civil war; a Middle Eastern country with a weak separation of state and religion (Yemen); and finally France, for its huge influence on the organization of the state and its bureaucracy.
The new, completely revised edition, Bureaucratics Revisited, provides context and reflects on the project in all its facets, including its own history. It also contains 25 additional photos. Among these are images from Mozambique, an early (2002) Bureaucratics chapter in black and white; and also from Colombia, Italy and Uganda, made between 2010 and 2025. They are part of my later project, Law & Order, but are closely related thematically and compositionally to Bureaucratics.
In each of these countries, we visited countless offices of executive members across various services and at different levels. Our goal was to portray “street-level bureaucracy” as the average citizen encounters it—whether applying for a permit, accessing an archive, paying taxes, or filing a police report. To achieve this, we conducted unannounced visits, capturing offices in their unaltered, everyday state. Writer Will Tinnemans engaged employees in interviews, preventing them from tidying up or staging the space.
Of course, we needed a rock-solid, all-encompassing permission – preferably on paper. With that in hand, we could take advantage of the hierarchical nature of the bureaucratic system, overrule local bosses and avoid constantly having to negotiate. Obtaining such a permit proved a task of herculean proportions. It took hundreds of phone calls and thousands of emails, and at least as much time as the actual photographing (and writing).
Style
On the stylistic aspect of Bureaucratics, Martin Parr wrote: “If rigour is the new watchword for contemporary photography, then Jan Banning and his collaborator, the writer Will Tinnemans, supply it by the bucket load and must be masters of this art.” (Martin Parr, foreword to Bureaucratics (Portland, OR: Nazraeli, 2008).) The work became a tightly structured typological example of conceptual documentary photography, in which I allowed myself only the most minimal interventions, such as repositioning a cup slightly. I never directed poses, except to ask subjects to look into the lens.
I shot from a frontal perspective as much as possible – straight-on – applying a deadpan aesthetic. This emphasized the rigid nature of the bureaucratic system. I aimed for maximum symmetry, in other words: compositional mundanity. In terms of form, I was inspired by Dutch painters such as Vermeer, and in particular Mondrian. I photographed from the visitor’s eye level, so the camera’s ‘gaze’ aligned with that of a client of the bureaucrat – looking down at the desk. Every office presented this physical barrier between the official and the viewer – a symbol of the unyielding laws and regulations that sit between the civil servant and the citizen: a fortification dividing the representatives of the system from the outside world, and protecting them from it. The result is “an unsettling catalogue of the established order – an order that, over time, has constructed a granite-like image to assert its dominant position over the ordinary citizen, replicating itself across all types of societies and cultures” (Maurizio G. De Bonis and Orith Youdovich, Il senso dell’ umano: Saggi sulla Fotografia e le Arti Visive dei Paesi Bassi [The Meaning of the Human: Essays on Photography and the Visual Arts of the Netherlands] (Rome: Postcart, 2025), p. 158.).
Exhibitions
Next to the book, there is also an exhibition that has so far been shown in museums and galleries in some twenty countries on five continents. Prints found their way into the collections of museums, universities, companies and private collectors in the US, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and beyond. In 2011, Amsterdam-based Galerie Fontana began representing my work and recently, I joined Robert Klein Gallery (Boston, US). Over time, dozens of photos were acquired by American museums such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego (CA), and by museums and corporate and private collectors in other countries. Recently, a considerable selection was acquired by the National Museum of Photography in Rotterdam and in 2022, Dutch software company AFAS purchased the entire series.
Bureaucratics Revisited
Charlotte Cotton, author of the book The Photograph as Contemporary Art, wrote that now is an excellent time to revisit Bureaucratics and examine whether our original intentions are still relevant. “Their creation of a visual record and textual account of state and civic institutions in eight countries adheres to a historically-grounded idea of photography as a tool of social documentary. My first encounter with Bureaucratics was in the throes of photography as contemporary art’s dismantling of the very idea of photography as a veracious medium. Banning’s photographs struck a cultural chord with me, precisely because of their unequivocal and somewhat unfashionable indexicality: the photo as ‘proof’ of reality. The project was a powerful reminder that photography could still document contemporary realities—a medium that seemed to magically open doors into secret and closed worlds, made visible through a photographic taxonomy – organizing and categorizing photos based on shared characteristics – such as Bureaucratics. Looking at these photographs now, I still see the weight of bureaucracy and the gravitational and symbolic heaviness that weighs down upon the structures and individuals administering national civil service. Akin to the regular tick of a metronome regardless of the arc of regime change, autocracy, civil war and democracy, I see and feel the noble intentions as well as the encroaching fragility of administrations that Banning and Tinnemans encountered. I see these photographs of office-bound bureaucrats as a taxonomy of an endangered species, disappearing unnoticed. The urgency of capturing their specificities two decades ago is now undeniable.”
Snapshots of a Vanishing World
My aim with this new edition is to invite reflection on the nature of bureaucracy, the influence of culture on governance, and the role of the state. We can assume that the face bureaucracy presents to the world has undergone profound changes since these photographs were taken—more dramatically in some countries than others, even if driven solely by automation and digitalization. As of 2026, access to many of these countries remains restricted, if not entirely impossible.
In today’s political climate, it would probably be barely, if at all, feasible to undertake a project like Bureaucratics. Yemen has fallen prey to a devastating civil war. In several other countries, administrative controls have been tightened considerably. It is hard to imagine an artist and a writer from Western Europe now being granted access to the bureaucratic apparatus of Russia or China. Thus, this project has become not only an artistic document, but also a historical glimpse into a vanishing world.
Jan Banning
* Bureaucratics Revisited contains i.a. an overview of publications, exhibitions and print sales.
* Explore the full project and order the book at www.janbanning.com
* In 2004, the India chapter won first prize in the category portraits of World Press Photo.