In 2014, Ryan Debolski spent a year in Oman on a Fulbright Fellowship, photographing the migrant laborers whose work sustains the country’s oil and natural gas economy. The men he depicts come chiefly from East Africa and the Indian subcontinent. They live for years in camps, separated from families, and they hold on to cheap, widely available smartphones as a way of managing the isolation. Friendships form quickly, then are severed without warning when a worker is deported or reassigned to another camp. That instability—of presence, of community, of who will still be there tomorrow—gives LIKE its uneasy subject.
The book, published by Gnomic Book in 2020, runs 136 pages and holds 96 images. Its title is deceptively plain. Debolski is not documenting Omani society at large; he is looking at the point where physical labor and digital life overlap, where a man’s body is fixed in a camp while his attention travels through a screen. The photographs register both the hardness of the work and the improvised social world that grows around it. Read in this context, the photographs invite attention to the duration of encounters and to the uncertainty that shapes relationships between workers.
Jason Koxvold’s essay, Raw Material: Capital and Exploitation at the Neoliberal Frontier, places the photographs within the longer history of how labor has been pictured in art. Its concern with capital and exploitation offers a framework for asking how photographs represent workers whose mobility and employment are governed by forces outside their control. The pairing of Debolski’s images with Koxvold’s argument gives the book a spine.
Gnomic Book is an independent fine art imprint, and LIKE belongs to the tradition of photobooks that treat a specific place and a specific labor regime as a way of speaking about something wider. Its first edition, first printing was 450 copies. For a collector, the book’s interest lies less in scarcity than in its subject and its structure: a photographer working with sustained access, an essay that treats representation as a problem, and a subject—migrant labor and digital life—that connects the organisation of work with the maintenance of personal relationships.
