"Time matters": reflections on time, photography, and labour

Abstract

With regard to the early days of photography, Roland Barthes (1982) described cameras as “clocks for seeing”. Taking this statement as the starting point, the following essay explores how the relationship between photography and time has been strongly shaped by capitalist modes of production since its inception. The essay addresses the work of several artists and photographers, from the early days of photography to the present, and places them in dialogue with texts on time, labour and photography. The essay is divided into three parts. The first part analyses time-motion studies conducted by Eadweard J. Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey and Frank and Lilian Gilbreth in the 1880s, focusing on how the aesthetics of these photographs were deeply entangled with notions of time and efficiency endorsed by industrial capitalism. The second part addresses the existing gap between human and mechanical time, by rereading Man Ray’s Indestructible Object (1964) and Tehching Hsieh’s Clock Piece (1980-1981) in relation to notions of discipline and chrononormativity (Foucault, 1969; Freeman, 2010). The third part of the essay introduces the work of artists, such as Erwin Wurm, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, or Hiroshi Sugimoto. I analyse the tactics they use for resisting and escaping the “tyranny of the clock” (Woodcock, 1944) and place them in relation to my own practice as a photographer. All in all, I argue that each photograph embodies a very particular way of understanding time that embraces, resists or escapes capitalist modes of producing value. By analysing specific aspects of photography, the text brings to the forefront the (often hidden) politics of time embedded in the photographic medium.