Sushma Prasad is an assistant clerk to the Cabinet Secretary of the State of Bihar, India. Her desk is relatively neat, but behind her is a chaotic pile of irretrievable facts buried in hundreds of tattered paper files. Prasad is one of fifty civil servants Jan Banning photographed in Bolivia, France, Yemen, Russia, Liberia, India, China, and Texas. They engage us as individuals, but Banning has titled his series of color portraits after the system in which his subjects labor: Bureaucratics. Whether sitting behind a card table in Liberia or a marble-topped desk in Russia, this array of mostly appointed officials are, according to essayist Will Tinnemans, each a "small clog in the gigantic machinery of the state." Those whose needs have brought them into these offices will find that the person behind the desk may or may not be able or willing to help them.



Compare Banning's project with Paul Shambroom's series Meetings, panoramic images of small town city councils and school boards shot in a variety of American locales. Shambroon's diverse groups are often amusing, but we accept them as decision-makers, a demonstration of democracy at the grassroots level. On the other hand, we assume that Banning's subjects are largely in the business of saying "No." Banning's subjects can be both harder to take seriously and more intimidating, perhaps because we know so little of their actual situations, but perhaps also because they are so familiar. You are not likely to find yourself before Alham Abdulwaze Nuzeli of the Ministry of Tithing and Alms in Al-Mahwit, Yemen, but her portrait will bring to mind all your own encounters with bureaucracy, beginning with the ladies who ran the elementary school lunch line to that Department of Sanitation Code Enforcement officer who just would not listen to reason.

—Charles Dee Mitchell