Zachary Formwalt, In Place of Capital, 2009. single-channel HD video still. Courtesy the artist.
Zachary Formwalt
2 November – 21 December 2013
at VOX centre de l’image contemporaine,
Montréal
Capital Imagery and the Traces of the Living
Johan Hartle
The Latin-derived term capital (as echoed in “capital crime†or “capital punishmentâ€) refers to a crime for which one has to pay with one’s life, or more literally (going back to the original caput) one’s head. Also in the Marxist sense of the term and in Marx’s own metaphor, as coagulated “living labour,†or, more explicitly, “dead labour,†capital is linked to death in various ways.
Along these lines, Zachary Formwalt’s reflections on the history of photography are dealing with various forms of capital imagery as well. His materialist approach to the history of photography—embedding the successive development of the medium in the histories of finance, capital accumulation, and urban development—not only emphasizes photography’s structural analogies with the history and development of capital (the effect that the development of capitalism, economic crises, the stock market, bankers, etc. have played in it); it also points to the potential of photography as a space for that which it tends to repress: moving, acting, and productive bodies.
Formwalt thus accentuates the symbolically (or more precisely, ideologically) loaded tensions between photography (the long exposure times of Henry Fox Talbot’s early photographs of architecture, the picturesque representation of nature) and early forms of film (such as Eadweard Muybridge’s chronophotography or forms of time-lapse photography) with bodily motion and the temporality of production, or, more emphatically put: human agency.
This goes far beyond the commonsensical lament concerning the relation between photography and death (which holds a prominent position in the theory of photography). Formwalt’s interest is more precise: seen from a materialist perspective (according to which human beings produce their own circumstances), photographic imagery is interpreted as a form of dead labour, which tends to fetishize the object of its representation as if it was not embedded in social relations, as if it had not been effected by human history. [read the full text here]
VOX centre de l’image contemporaine–
4th Floor
2 Rue Sainte-Catherine Est‎
Montréal, QC H2X 1K4, Canada
voxphoto.com
Opening hours
Tuesday – Friday: 12h00 to 19h00
Saturday 11h00 – 17h00
Zachary Formwalt, In Place of Capital, 2009. single-channel HD video still. Courtesy the artist.
Zachary Formwalt, Through a Fine Screen, 2010. single-channel HD video still. Courtesy the artist.
Zachary Formwalt, Through a Fine Screen, 2010. single-channel HD video still. Courtesy the artist.
Zachary Formwalt, Unsupported Transit, 2011. single-channel HD video still. Courtesy the artist.
Zachary Formwalt, Unsupported Transit, 2011. single-channel HD video still. Courtesy the artist.