Allan Sekula. Collective Sisyphus
WARNING. I'm the longshoreman your mother warned you about (The Dockers' Museum, object nr. 8)
WARNING. I'M THE LONGSHOREMAN YOUR MOTHER WARNED YOU ABOUT, plastic printed sign (bumper sticker), mass produced, 20.2 x 29.8 cm. Purchased by Allan Sekula through eBay on March 24, 2010. [TDM 8].
A joke graphic in the form of a traffic sign, something typically American, Sekulas own biographic background, growing up in the port of Los Angelos. The term longshoreman is a more typical American synonym for Docker, like stevedore or warphie (wharf labourer) is for Australia. Nowadays people in California also use the term longie, which morphologie is taken from the Australian habit of using diminutives which shorten a noun using an “ie”-ending. Normally Americans don’t do that, but the founder of the Dockers Workers Union was Australian, which may explain this. The word stevedore originated in Portugal or Spain, and entered the English language through its use by sailors. It started as a phonetic spelling of estivador (Portuguese) or estibador (Spanish), meaning a man who stuffs, here in the sense of a man who loads ships, which was the original meaning of stevedore.