Weird, Brightly Lit Photos of London's Eastern European Construction Workers

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

You get to a point, generally somewhere past your teens, when you think you can't be surprised anymore. Agne Kucinskaite, 23, felt she'd reached that stage pretty recently, when she started trying to take photos of Eastern European construction workers in both the UK and Lithuania. Generally, she expected to uncover stories of discrimination, hardship, struggle.

That's not quite how things panned out. "I met a Polish man and started to ask him questions," she says about the early days of her Construction photography project. She braced herself for tales of isolation or mistreatment. "But he smiled at me and said that his was a good and easy job, and he felt as he was treated well. I spoke with another worker; he said that he sometimes feels stereotyped and overlooked. Yet, they both said that the construction business is one of the most open-minded towards immigrants."

And that was the end of her preconceptions. Agne is Lithuanian herself, living in London while studying photography here. She's interested in exploring identity, and figured the construction industry—one believed to be dominated by Romanian, Polish, and Lithuanian laborers—would be a good enough place to start.

In spring this year, after months of negotiating access with construction site manager and companies, she started shooting in both Lithuania and the UK. "In the six months I spent on the project, I was allowed fewer than ten visits that on average lasted less than an hour," she says. "It was trickier to persuade companies in England to let me visit the sites, as the health and safety restrictions here are stricter than they were in Lithuania."

She wriggled her way in, though, to shoot this series of stark and brightly lit photos from inside various construction sites. A lot of the photos are so close-up they're almost abstract, mostly due to the restrictions on what she could see and who'd be up for being photographed. Agne chatted Brexit with some of the guys and was "really surprised to see that most people weren't worried about it. Partly, I felt that people didn't believe it was going to happen. Others thought that it wouldn't change much. I got the impression that most people have built lives here that they like—some of them have lived here for more than a decade, their UK-born children go to schools here and from time to time they go for a pint in a local pub. The Brexit decision came to many of them as a shock."

Throughout, she learned to let the men there tell their own stories, unshackled from assumptions. "When I was shooting in a small town in Lithuania, almost all of the construction workers were older. One of them told me that he had two jobs in order to support his family. Though he was in his fifties or sixties, he'd go to do a shift as a security guard after a day of hard physical work."

Away from the roar of tabloid headlines and anti-immigrant hysteria, there was room to breathe. With her camera in hand, she felt she could let her photos tell their own story. An issue this complicated lands in a place where migration meets anxiety over national resources and collides with what looks to be the next stage of British multiculturalism. To try to make sense of it, she realised you have to strip back your own prejudices and let people speak.

"I met many people on the sites who had higher education diplomas, or were into in art or politics. We had very interesting conversations and a good laugh, and all of them were friendly. To conclude, I think that my chats with the men working made me realize that discussion of how eastern European construction workers go about their work isn't an easy one to answer—and if it was, the answers themselves wouldn't be simple."

Follow Agne on Instagram and Tshepo on Twitter.