Job/Security: A Composite Portrait of the Expanding American Security Industry

An illuminating collection of candid interviews and photographs with workers in America’s burgeoning security state.

In a world increasingly under surveillance, this cutting-edge documentary collaboration turns the camera on the ever-expanding American security state. Job/Security bears photographic and narrative witness to the people tasked with safeguarding our modern world. In these uniquely revealing interviews and photographs, authors Danny Goodwin and Edward Schwarzschild assemble a multifaceted portrait of the labor of security. They offer a close-up, in-depth look at what the near-ubiquitous business of monitoring, guarding, and protecting life and property in the United States means for the individuals who do the work, and for the society they ostensibly serve. 

Representing a wide range of perspectives from inside this vast field, Job/Security features men and women who work in homeland security, border patrol, the secret service, and emergency management, among other fields. In candid terms, these enforcers, critics, and targets of security regimes describe their working lives—their jobs, routines, backgrounds, and families—as well as their feelings about what they do. Their stories offer a rare glimpse into the internal complexities of security work and fresh insight into what the encroaching security state is doing to America’s hearts and minds, one worker at a time, and to society at large, on an intimately human scale.

Danny Goodwin is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University at Albany, SUNY. His photographic, video, and installation work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions and published extensively in the United States and Europe.

Edward Schwarzschild is Professor and Director of Creative Writing in the English Department at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the author of three works of fiction, In Security, The Family Diamond, and Responsible Men; and his writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.