The representation of work has left its mark on the history of photography and of the great World’s Fairs. In its celebration of the automation and dematerialisation of work, the Osaka World’s Fair of 1970 took issue with this historical current, foregrounding the advent of the “information society” in a series of audiovisual installations presented as the culmination of post-industrial capitalism. In this context artist Okamoto Taro’s photographic frieze The Common Man had an anachronistic look: in its use of black and white images in the Family of Man tradition and its vision of a human community united by the value of work, it seemed at odds with the rest of the exhibition, while testifying to the inner contradictions of a Japan faced with the emergence of the “leisure society”.