We examine the feasibility of gauge invariant descriptions of the gluon polarization following the proposal that a gauge field can be decomposed into its physical part and its pure gauge part. We show that gauge invariant angular momentum currents can be constructed from summations of gauge variant Noether currents. We present novel expressions of the pure gauge field, which are used to formulate gauge invariant descriptions of the gluon spin and the photon spin. We show that the gauge invariant extension of the Chern-Simons current can describe the spins of the Laguerre-Gauss laser modes. We also discuss the relation of gauge invariant operators and the parton distributions constructed from Dirac variables.