Electricity Workers

This second Electricity Workers print offers a complementary view of the same trade, likely a different task — splicing wire, setting an insulator, or bracing the pole — or a different vantage on the figures already shown. Pairing related compositions is a recurring device in Wada Sanzo's occupational series, allowing a trade to be understood through more than a single instant. The figure's gear — climbing harness, work gloves, peaked cap, and the linesman's pliers or pincers tucked at the belt — is rendered with the same documentary specificity as its companion, while the geometry of pole, cable, and crossarm continues to organize the picture plane. Color is laid in flat fields registered cleanly off a firm keyblock, the technique consistent with sosaku-hanga practice of the period. Within Wada's broader catalogue of Japanese trades, the two electricity prints together affirm his interest in the new occupations of modern infrastructure as worthy of the same considered treatment he gave to dyers, fishermen, and farmers.