Workers (Chinese: 工人; pinyin: gongren) is a book of 143 portraits of migrant workers who participated in the construction of the Olympic Green in Beijing, China in the lead up to the 2008 Summer Olympics.
The book is the work of British artist Helen Couchman and consists primarily of photographs of the workers on the building site.
In December 2007, Couchman circumvented security on the Olympic construction site and was able to approach the workers about taking their pictures.
[5] In the book's introduction, British art critic Peter Suchin writes that the way Couchman positions the workers at roughly the same spot for each portrait suggests they can also be seen as "one single portrait, that of `the worker' engaged in the making of the Place of the Games ... the central focus, the essential signifier of the new Beijing".
Discussions of workers' rights have been raised in the context of this book, but it was not Couchman's reason for starting the project.